New Year, New Life

In Senegal pregnancy isn't something you talk about. In a country where people can greet complete strangers by asking "How is your father's penis?" (Still haven't figured out how to answer that), it is considered extremely rude to discuss someone, even a close family member, being pregnant. I know, I don't really get it either. Maybe a lot of it has to do with not wanting to get too attached to a baby...there is still a pretty high infant mortality rate here, and people wait a week before they'll even call a baby by its name.

So even though my sister Somong has been big as a barge for a while now I was a bit surprised to come home on January 1st to find out that she had given birth at 5am that morning our villages first baby of the New Year! I'm not the most perceptive of individuals (and I don't make it a habit of studying other women's bodies) so I'm sure I was one of the last people to notice that she was pregnant in the first place...but I was totally unprepared for the baby to arrive this soon! Also, if you do the math you'll realize that the baby must have been conceived around the same time I moved into my village...kind of weird to realize I've been here long enough for someone to completely grow another human.

    I arrived at the health post about 5 hours after the baby was born, and since for everyone else newborn babies have long since lost their charm I got to monopolize the baby for a couple of hours while his mom rested. There was another mother at the health post, a girl of about 15, who had given birth the day before to her second child. Since hers was a girl they joked that when the two babies were old enough they would marry them to each other. 5 hours out of the womb and my nephew already has a wife lined up for him.

Since this was the couples first baby and its a boy, the baptism/naming ceremony, held exactly 7 days after the baby is born (both to give the mom time to recover and to make sure the baby is going to live), was a HUGE affair. Relatives from as far off as the Gambia started converging on our house at 6am Saturday morning, and all of the women in the village were recruited to help cook massive amounts of food while the men sat around in the shade and talked. Like any other Senegalese party, it wasn't complete without some constant source of noise, so my brother hired a DJ who brought a generator and speakers and played every Akon song known to man remixed a thousand ways until 3 in the morning. As far as baptisms go it was shaping up to the biggest event of the year. I didn't actually see the baby all day, even the naming and ceremonial shaving of the head was done without announcement or fanfare. Mostly the day was about everyone in the village celebrating life in general. For the record though, the baby's name is Abib.

Cooking breakfast for over 100 people

Breakfast is served...sac fo kosam (sour milk and millet)

The women eating their "breakfast" around 11am,
AFTER the men had been served and dishes washed

You know its a big event when someone goes to the trouble of renting chairs!

Witches cauldron? No, lunch pot.