We ate the alarm clock for lunch

Today for your enjoyment I have assembled several little stories to amuse you. The first begins with a trip 30km from my village to a language training seminar that lasted one week. Peace Corps gave us a little money to pay for food over the five day event. The event was simply having one of our language instructors and several volunteers do a follow up training which would give us the opportunity to get some questions answered on any challenges we’d had in village after a month and a half. Myself and three other volunteers were tenting out in the backyard of one persons hut and taking morning lessons from our teacher, Samba Kande(he’s a cool cat). This story though… is about chickens.
As soon as you try to do anything garden-wise in Senegal you realize one thing, which is that all animals are assholes. They eat your crops and dig up everything and generally just want to make sure that since things weren't quite hard enough… they’d make them just a bit harder by ruining all your hopes and dreams by having no respect for common decency and making as much noise at night as they do during the day. This had been the case for the volunteer who was our host for language seminar. Her backyard was constantly ravaged by the asshole chickens. One afternoon we returned to find a rooster lying in her backyard and it didn’t get up as we approached it. We next noticed that its feet were tied together and to a nearby post which accounted for its apathy. From this we surmised that some of the money given to her host family must have gone into the purchase of a chicken for one of our meals. Although it being late in the day meant that the chicken would be alive for the remainder of the day… and therefore the morning… meaning it would make plenty of noise for us to wake up to, and it did. I awoke to the roosters ignorant crowing the next morning at 5am. I was able to acquire a little more sleep before waking up at 7. Thankfully the annoying chicken was taken out while we breakfasted and hastily murdered. After class when the two bowls were brought into the hut for lunch there was chicken meat to be had. Also a unique centerpiece consisted of the chickens legs shoved through the mouth of the chicken’s head and the whole thing apparently cooked along with the rest of the meal.

My bathroom/shower area is a circular concrete pad with a hole in the middle, and at night big ole cockroaches like to exit and visit the surrounding areas on what I can only imagine to be inexpensive cockroach holidays or vacations. A few weeks ago I notice that one of the malnourished cats in my village was hanging around my shower area at night but didn’t think much of it. Then I saw it catch and eat a cockroach so I made a mental note to myself ‘cats eat cockroaches’. That is all.

One of the trips we made on our language seminar trip was to our host volunteer’s father’s charcoal pile. The process is very interesting to watch. They collect wood and make a big pile about seven feet tall and twelve feet wide. Then the pile is covered with grass and the grass with dirt. Then segments of the grass are lit on fire and the dirt covering keeps out enough air for a proper fire to take place but everything on the inside is burned except the carbon structure of the stick. Then you sell all your nice charcoal for a good profit and people all over Senegal use it to cook or make tea or whatever.

Cooking in Senegal is largely done in a pot over a small fire. There are three stones or objects to hold the pot about eight inches off the ground and a tiny fire is lit under it, typically with three or four sticks pointing to the center and as they burn the chef simply moves the ends into the center little by little. Most of what I consume is machined or hand pounded corn, millet, or sorghum steamed over whatever sauce is to go on it once it is ready. The cooking pot is placed on the fire and the sauce has too much water in it, but then a large shallow dish that looks somewhat like a wok is added above the cooking pot. This dish has holes in it and steam from the sauce rises into the cornmeal textured cereal cooking it. After it’s done the cereal is dished into communal bowls and topped with the sauce. Sauces come in several varieties but are generally salty and made with leaves. Sauces include maffe gerse which is cooked crushed peanuts and tomatoes, laalo is boabob tree leaves and is very slimy and green, follere is a thick green sauce made with okra, and usually jambo which is a salty watery sauce with moringa tree leaves and crushed peanuts.

Chickens can survive with one foot. There was a chick in my village which ran around hobbling and favoring a leg which had some string or something caught on it. As the chicken grew I presume the string cut off circulation and the foot died and fell off or something. Upon my return from the language seminar I found my crippled comrade meandering around on one foot and one stump. Just another interesting thing one might learn in Africa. 

 Here are some panorama shots from the inside of my hut. The mosquito net is above where my bed typically sits, although the bed was outside and I was sleeping in my backyard at the time of this photo.

 Here is a shot of the garden I work in, usually watering and transplanting and insect control.

 Here is a neat pile of bricks drying in the sun. The hole behind them is just water mixed with whatever you find when digging a hole. Then you wait a week and BAM! your house is halfway done.

 Pictured above are some tiny mangos just a growin! I can't wait for the them to be ripe. It looks like a medium tree should put out 600 or so and a large tree somewhere around 3000. There are about 25 big trees around my village. Yum.

 This is to give you an idea of the currency I carry around and never use in my village. Since my host family provides food daily and I need little else, plus there isn't much to buy, you just don't need money unless you're in a bigger town.

This is my work space. I'm going for sixteenth century philosopher trying to be up nights writing notes by candlelight.

This would be a shot of my backyard. The shower/bath area to the right.

Here is an average meal. There's rice, boabob leaf sauce, and crushed hot pepper. Typically one would use their RIGHT hand and mix some ingredients, then form them into a ball and place it into their mouth. I use a spoon.

But that doesn't mean that I can't go 30km out of village and sit in a hotel restaurant and enjoy stuff like this!

With disinterested apathy,

-Tom

Insh Allah

Several weeks ago I was down working in the garden I share with a man named Walli. I had just finished watering the entire garden by myself, a job which requires me to draw about 25 buckets of water, when Walli shows up. Often I do not see him it at all in the garden, which I do not blame him for because his brother passed away and he cares for his own family and his brothers in another village while working his fields and keeping up this garden. I am still at the stage in my language acquisition which dictates that I understand very little of what has been said to me and Walli begins telling me about what I gather to be his wife in the nearest town with a road, 4 miles away. He had spoken of her presence in the hospital there to me over the previous days but I didn’t understand the specifics. This time I gather that his wife is pregnant and then I catch onto the vague statement ‘baby died, but my wife is alive’. He follows this statement with ‘but you watered the garden, so that’s good’.  The loss of a child is a tragedy under any circumstance yet without competency in any common language I was unable to offer any condolences, and left standing there speechless. I think part of what offset me was the rapidity with which he moved onto the statement ‘but you watered the garden, so that’s nice’.  I theorized the reason which caused his actions were partially his own unique way of experiencing grief and partially a cultural normality of death as a very probable reality.  This event was followed by several similar ones which put me on a rather somber train of thought.

A week passed and one morning my host brother enters my hut and tells me that someone has died. Apparently a two year old child in a compound on the western side of my village died. My host brother tells me I should go and greet the family but leaves it at that. With little language under my control and no idea what one might say in such a situation I postpone for the expected greeting for the time. The next day someone asks me if I’ve greeted the family yet and I tell them I haven’t. Eventually my work partner comes to my hut and tells me I really should go and greet them and that he will help me. A work partner is a liaison between the volunteer and the village and culture. On the walk over I’m informed of the correct thing to say which is “_____ died. God is sad and sorry.” I nervously make my attempt to say this in Pulaar to the grieving family, worried that a screw up now might just make them feel worse. I’m still unsure whether the absence of their observable grief is cultural or individually based.  

Another two days pass and I wake up and head outside to greet the usual people with the five or six back and forth phrases. The first person I greet doesn’t greet me in return but tells me someone has died, and that this individual is the wife of my work partner. Now I’m just sinking fast because I consider my work partner to be an extremely nice man. Mama Sailliou(Sal-e-u) is his name, and he always speaks slowly and softly with me and tries his very best to bring me into comprehension.  I look on him almost like a Senegalese kindly old grandpa. Upon learning of his wife’s (whom I could not recall having met) passing it was all these ideas that made the event seem so saddening. Then I realized that I would need to go to his compound very soon and use the same words he’d taught me only days prior to communicate the culturally appropriate condolences. I began the short walk to his compound and arriving was informed that he had left and would return later in the day. It was nice to have a little time to process. Slow day, as one might expect, but as the sun began to set it was time to return and try again.

Half the community was grouped in the compound with most of the men and women sitting in separate circles chatting. There was a line of women six or so long on either side of a building all in what an American might term “their Sunday best”.   It is now just after dusk and I have yet to see my work partner.  There are groups of people sitting next to small fires, simply several sticks burning to keep a body warm for a short time and to throw a little light. Then a train of ten women walk into the compound and the third or fourth women is weeping and wailing. The novelty was when the full train arrived near the women sitting in front of the building all the women and children began to cry and wail simultaneously. The men sat somberly and the women and children mourned openly and briefly, the endeavor lasting only several minutes for the majority while a few children and women continued and did not cease as suddenly as they had begun.  The arrival of Mama Sailliou minutes later almost seemed anticlimactic after such events as I’d seen within that hour. Though as always he was polite and soft spoken and after accepting my condolences began trying to explain to me the cultural implications of what everyone was doing.  The wailing was a sort of controlled release of distress from individuals seeking comfort for their loss, and acting as a group gave solidarity and support. All interesting information but the man who was giving it to me had just lost his wife. I think the whole situation shows my Americanized sensibilities a new way of looking at things.

The new way of looking at things is verbally expressed by Senegalese and much of the Islamic world by the statement “Insh Allah” meaning ‘God willing’. In Senegal and in much of the world that has yet to be deemed ‘first world’ time has a different perception than in America and other ‘developed nations’. In America I’ve heard often “I have a meeting next week”.  The word ‘have’ in this context implies that the individual owns some part of the future.  Americans tend to think of the future as an obvious and malleable probability rather than a vague possibility. Americans say “I will see you next week” and consider it a certainty. Here in Senegal people will say “I will see you tomorrow, insh Allah”. If God agrees we will see one another tomorrow. This term is post positioned to almost every statement with regard to future events, because here there are many forces that might oppose such future planning.

Most jobs in America have strict tardiness policies stating that being late is a punishable offence. This mentality that the future is such a definite probability that if one fails to manage it they should be held accountable is considered by much of the rest of the world to be excessive. Here in Senegal within the next three hours you might become ill, get a flat tire, have a car break down, have a relative become sick, die, have a relative or friend or member of your village die, or there might be a birth, or there could be a fire, or there could be animals breaking into your garden and you need to take care of that immediately, and if you’re travelling any of these things could happen to the driver and thus it’s almost amazing that anyone manages to make it anywhere to me. Yet living in this culture makes one question their preconceived notions of time and that, to me, is wonderful. I came here to see things from a different angle and to learn crazy new things and for all the bad stuff that happens in the process I am incorporating mass amounts of new data into my worldview.

It’s just been swirling around in my head that Americans, who are so obsessed with their/our absolute control of the future, often stop just short of the final stage of life, death. It seems as though the Senegalese realize and accept this culturally. It’s rather freeing to live here because other people don’t become angry with you because you have failed to bend the future to your will. I might even call it a more realistic outlook. A guy comes to work late three times and he’s fired for not being a master of the space-time continuum.  Here you’re late and people are understanding and just kind of say… ‘shit happens’. I like it. My ideas are a bit jumbled but it’s Africa… shit happens!