Goza Got Married

The beautiful bride

On a rather belated note, my neighbor got "married" at the beginning of February to her American boyfriend who was visiting on vacation. Since it wasn't a real wedding they skipped right past all of the religious ceremonies and just stuck with the best part...the reception. About 30 volunteers from all over the country converged on her town in our Senegalese finest with gifts of live poultry, boiled eggs and nesting bowls full of MSG powder. Everything required to make a good party truly great, including $2 wine sipped surreptitiously out of empty Coke cans (inspired by our favorite show, Its Always Sunny in Philadelphia). Kourtney, Ari and I served as the bridesmaids, our only job being to look fabulous in our chiquita banana themed completes. A $100 sheep was slaughtered and amazing ceeb u jen (rice and fish) was served for lunch along with hard boiled eggs and tomatoes stuffed with mayonnaise. The event was an amazing mash-up of Senegalese and American traditions...Senegalese ataya (tea) + American alcohol, Senegalese drumming + American gangster rap, and Senegalese dancing + a surprise rendition of Hava Nagila (Jessica's half Jewish) that terrified Jessica and confused the heck out of the Senegalese guests (see video). It was certainly the best non-wedding I've ever been a part of.

Chiquita Banana Bridesmaids (note the wine in a can)

Lunch for 40...rice and sheep

Waste not want not...

Kristmas in Kaolack

No white Christmas this year...

While most volunteers chose to hit the beach for the holidays, I decided to take the budget option and spend Christmas at our regional transit house in the city of Kaolack. There were only three of us, so it was pretty low key, but we still managed to have a good time. We baked cookies while listening to Christmas music, watched all of the classic holiday movies, had a gift exchange for which we all raided our buckets and trunks to find random things we didn't want anymore, and of course we made a fabulous Christmas dinner that cost us a whopping $60. Totally worth it.

Christmas dinner! Green beans, roast beef, mac
and cheese, baked potatoes, yogurt dip with
cucumbers and of course, cookies!

  The worst Christmas gift I received this year was from Senegal itself...a fever, strep throat and an ear infection. I spent much of the day wrapped in a sheet and fighting to stay awake. On the positive side, the Peace Corps gave me one of the best Christmas presents I've ever received...the paperwork and manuals associated with my Close of Service! That's right, its time to start preparing to go home! Its still four months away, but with the amount of government paperwork, medical examinations and hoops we have to jump through before we can leave, we get to begin the process now. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Merry Christmas!

Neem wreath.

Happy Thanksgiving

The essentials for celebrating an American Thanksgiving in Senegal

A sheep dressed as a Native American

Deep fried turkey

Tons of food

Turkey Pinata

Tabaski

Warning: This post contains blood and guts

Another Senegalese holiday come and gone...if I'm not mistaken its my last one. It went much as one would expect; men to the mosque in the morning, followed by the killing of some less-than-appetizing animal, hours of cooking for the women and sitting for the men, eating copious amounts of oily macaroni with onion and meat sauce and, finally, putting on fancy clothes as the sun goes down. The general program remains the same no matter what the holiday. Since yesterday was Tabaski, the animal of choice was the ram that's been bleating outside my door every night this past week. Needless to say I wasn't sorry to see him go. We killed a total of 4 rams among the men of our household, slitting their throats and letting the blood drain into a hole in the ground. The slaughter didn't go off as smoothly as last year, and two of the rams took a good 3 minutes of sawing and hacking at the spinal column with a dull knife to dispatch. The men then proceeded with the still-kicking carcasses to the mango tree, which they turned into a slaughterhouse of startling efficiency. I observed the undressing of the sheep from the lower branches, perched well above the clouds of flies and safe from errant splashes of feces and blood. Many hands and a few sharp machetes made quick work of the bodies, thus concluding the most exciting part of the day.

Teamwork

  
 

Talk about grabbin' a sheep by the balls

Prime cut

Liqueur de Warang

This past weekend 12 volunteers converged on Liqueur de Warang, a local distillery just outside of Mbour that makes fruit liqueurs from local ingredients and spices. It has been on my Senegal bucket-list for quite a while now, and the simultaneous birthdays of two of my stage-mates was the perfect excuse for an 11am tasting.

The distillery looks like a cross between a monastery and a botanical garden, and has a beautiful outdoor bar. There are six or seven different liqueurs available for free tasting that vary depending on season and availability.We quickly made good friends with the guy behind the bar, who poured us more than our fair share of free shots, and explained how they were distilled and flavored.

Tasting options

Kombonella was an orange, lemon and grapefruit concoction that tasted just like a lemon drop. It had a sour first bite and an alcoholic bite that delivered a swift kick to the uvula on the way down. In my opinion it was better taken as a shot rather than sipped, but then again I'm not a huge fan of sour. My favorite part was the chunks of real fruit resting on the bottom of my shot glass.

Passion Warang was a sweeter liqueur with a slightly lower alcohol content that was distilled from passion fruit. It had less of a bite, which made me feel less guilty about drinking it at 11 o'clock in the morning. I could imagine sipping it poolside on a hot summer day.

Cocana was a pineapple and coconut concoction that tasted more or less like a pina colada. You could definitely taste the coconut.

Menthe was, in my opinion, exactly what Senegalese attaya (tea) should taste like. The only ingredients are sugar and mint leaves bought in the local market, yet the whiskey-colored liquid managed to conjure up all kinds of different associations. It was like pepperment hot-chocolate, but without the chocolate. Not a toothpaste/mouthwashy mint flavor, but the sweet minty aftertaste of a glass of attaya without  the bitterness of the green tea. I liked it so much I bought a bottle.

Kombonella

Pomme Cajou is made by fermenting cashew apples, and it was the flavor that surprised me the most. I'm not a big fan of cashew fruit, because although the fruit itself is extremely juicy (and messy!), it has so many tannins that it immediately sucks all moisture out of your mouth and turns your lips inside out. I have a really hard time getting past the dryness to even recognize the flavor, so I was pleasantly surprised to have my first real taste of cashew apples in the liqueur. Delicious!

Creme de Warang was last but certainly not least on the list. This one was my absolute favorite, a creamy mix of milk, cocoa, coffee, sugar and bananas. It would be perfect in an Irish coffee. I was so taken with it that the bartender offered me several more shots, and I ended up leaving with two bottles; one to be carefully rationed for the rest of my service and one to bring home to America to share!

Korite

Aladji in his Korite Best

 Ramadan officially came to an end last Tuesday night with everyone crowded together in our compound staring up at the sky. My dads first wife Ami was the first to spot the thin sliver of moon that marks the end of the month of fasting and suddenly everyone was jumping up and down, pointing to the sky and cheering. For the past week Korite (Eid-al-Fitir), the end of Ramadan feast, was the only thing people could talk about. To celebrate our return to a normal eating schedule everyone puts on their nicest clothes and spends the entire day feasting and drumming and going from house to house to ask forgiveness for any wrongs you may have committed in the past year. The kids get together in little groups to show off their holiday best and ask for money and treats at each house.

Preparing the meat

 I spent the morning helping my mom peel potatoes, onions and garlic for the french-fry/onion/macaroni sauce that goes with the meat. Our meat this year was one kilo of questionable beef parts and two cows feet, so I went ahead and bought a chicken so there would be something worth eating in the bowl. Once All the kids were washed and dressed I took an individual portrait of each one looking as clean as they will probably ever be, and gave each of them a little goodie-bag of toys that I'd saved from care-packages sent over the past few months.

My dad doing what he does best

 Around 2pm all of the men and boys crowded around the bowls for lunch (they must have been hungry after sitting around doing nothing all morning) while the women waited in a different part of the compound. Once the men had eaten their fill me and my moms and sisters got to dine on what was left. Fortunately for me, my mom and I squirreled away the two drumsticks of the chicken which I breaded and fried, so we got a little more than just stomach parts and oily macaroni.

My sisters in their new complets

 After lunch everyone made the rounds to atone for their wrongs in the past year. Someone would pop into the compound with a resounding "Forgive me!" and everyone would answer back "There's nothing to forgive!" and then they would start in on the blessings. "May Allah give you health," "May Allah give you money," "May Allah give you good crops," "May Allah bring the rains," etc. etc. for up to ten minutes. Everyone in the compound just agrees with an "Amin." Most of the blessings I received seemed to be hinting at something. "May Allah give you a husband," "May Allah give you a lot of sons," "May Allah give you a good marriage." My favorite was, "May Allah bless your vagina to bear many children." I think my village wants me to hurry up and get married already. After all, I'm getting old and I'd better start now if I hope to reach the double digits with my offspring. At this point in my service I'm tired of arguing...I just said "Amin."

Babies in their best

As the day wore on and everyone slipped into their own private food comas the activity settled down and I slipped back into my room for a few hours to read and relax. Around dusk the drumming started up from several different parts of the village and everyone in my family made their way out to the dance parties. The women danced until dawn and the men stayed awake until all hours of the morning blasting religious "teachings" on their radios. I must admit, these "teachings" (I prefer to call them screechings) are my absolute least favorite part of life in Senegal. Noise ordinances don't exist in Africa, and so when things get too quiet at say, two or three in the morning, people decide to fill the aural emptiness with various forms of repetitive "prayers on tape." For an ear-splitting example, visit my friend Justin's blog post Here. There is no escaping them...blasting from stalls in the market, blaring from speakers attached to the top of public transport, descending from the minarets of mosques and, especially on holidays, scratching out of the tinny speakers of a thousand made in China radios in my village.

Cows foot, anyone?

Around 3am the festivities finally wound down and people made their way back home. I'm looking forward to going back to the normal routine of lunch at 3pm and dinner at 9 and being allowed to drink water in the heat of the day. 

Happy Birthday Amerik!

Kedougou has an ice cream man...who knew?

 This year I celebrated the 4th of July in Kegougou, a region in the south east of Senegal with a couple of waterfalls, some modest hills and a lot more green than anywhere else in the country. About 100 volunteers descended on the regional house for a weekend of all-American fun. There was a pool party at a local hotel, bike trips to local waterfalls, horseshoes, beer and a good old fashioned pig roast. Nothing says American like a cold can of beer and a plate full of pork, two things extremely hard to come by in a muslim country. In honor of the occasion, I've compiled a short list of things about America that I didn't realize were so amazing until I spent a year in Senegal.

Two pigs in the ground, one for the grill

1. Anonymity- In a country as racially diverse as the United States it's pretty easy to blend in with the crowd, even in predominately ethnic neighborhoods. Its not uncommon to see a black person in Chinatown or a Mexican in Harlem and most people don't give it a second thought. As a white person living in Senegal, however, its impossible to remain anonymous. As soon as I step out my front door I stick out like a sore thumb. Even if I dress in traditional clothes, speak three local languages and suck dirty well water out of a plastic bag that I bought out the window of a public transport vehicle I will never be mistaken for Senegalese. I stick out like a sore thumb and from the moment I leave my village people shout Toubab ("white person") at me from all directions, small children cry at the sight of me and street children follow me around like a pack of wild dogs pinching my skin and throwing rocks.

2. Cleanliness is next to Godliness- Hand washing. Trash disposal. Sterile medical facilities. Food sanitation laws. After a year of watching kids poop next to our food bowl, grown men mine for gold up their nose next to me on the bus and raw sewage flowing freely through the streets of Kaolack, American's penchant for over-regulating, over-sanitizing and over-medicating doesn't seem so bad.

3. Punctuality- In America you call a meeting and people show up five minutes early. In Senegal you call a meeting and people show up two hours late. In America now means now. In Senegal now means any time from 2-10 hours later. In America public transport operates on a schedule. In Senegal public transport barely operates and you should expect to wait 2-5 hours for a car to fill up and leave.

Large hills

4. One price for everyone- I can't wait to go shopping in a country where the price of an item doesn't depend on the color of your skin, where its illegal to charge someone 4x the fair price for vegetables just because they're white, and where people don't exert a "toubab tax" on public transportation.

5. Racism is wrong- In Senegal, racism is a way of life. You could never get away with addressing someone as "white person" in America as if it was their name, or shouting "xonknop" (red ears, the Senegalese equivalent of nigger) at them from across the street. People don't throw rocks at people who look different, charge different prices for different races or force white people to take the worst seat on public transport. I have so much more respect for MLK jr, because after a year of almost constant harassment because of my race I don't know how much more I can take.

6. Things that work- Senegalese people break EVERYTHING. Give a child a stuffed animal and they will immediately start dismembering it. Wheels fall off of moving cars, huts collapse in the rain because they aren't maintained, the only ATM in the city remains broken for weeks, and massive power outages cause riots in the streets.

Termite Mound

7. Common courtesy- Americans can wait in an orderly line. If a pregnant woman or old lady gets on a bus young men will give up their seat. If someone spits on your foot while washing for Friday prayers they apologize profusely. People say "please," "excuse me," and "thank you" regularly. No one demands you give them money / a present / the shirt off your back. These things are AMAZING.

8. Work Ethic- The American Dream means working hard to improve your life. People respect hard work and most people don't feel good at the end of the day unless they've accomplished something. The Senegalese Dream is to sit around under a tree drinking tea until some NGO shows up and gives you something for free. People refuse to do any work that does not have an immediate pay-off...investing in your future is not a wise decision since it involves hard work without visible results.

9. Women's Rights- I can't wait to move back to a country where I don't get asked to become someone's third wife on a daily basis, where my male friends don't get asked to sell me to some gross old man, where I can sit in the front seat of a vehicle, wear pants and "do sports" without getting yelled at by some sexist old man. A country where I don't have to explain to people why I don't want to be married with three kids at 23 years old, where people don't constantly remind me that my biological clock is ticking and where my worth is not based solely on my marital status.

10. FOOD!- God bless the land of variety. Mexican, Chinese, Thai, German, Vietnamese, Japanese, Diners, Italian...the list goes on and on. In Senegal you can choose from one of 10 ethnic dishes, although they all contain rice, fish and oil so why even bother to choose. God bless the land of availability. Supermarkets in every city, convenience stores on every corner, farmers markets in every yuppie neighborhood, 24 hour drive throughs, grocery delivery services. In my village I have to walk 2k to the nearest boutique and if I don't get the vegetables I need on Tuesday market I don't eat them all week.

ANTS!

Mary Gets Married

 

  Peace Corps is all about promoting cross-cultural understanding, getting to really know your village and letting the people in your village really get to know you. Sometimes you get to know someone so well you realize you want to spend the rest of your lives sharing your cultures. Yesterday I had the privilege of attending the wedding of Mary and Malik in Jilor. Since they will be having an American wedding when they travel back to the States at the end of Mary's service in a few weeks this was a primarily Senegalese affair, although with a few American touches.

  

Kaolack sub-region volunteers

At 11am about 30 of us dressed up in our Senegalese best and piled into an alham (made to seat 20) for the hour long drive out to Mary's village. Weddings in Senegal are an all day affair, and throughout the day the bride and groom are each occupied with their own wedding obligations. The men get to chew cola nuts and go to the mosque for the "official" marriage ceremony (no women allowed, not even the bride!) and the bride spends the day being primped, prepped and presented to the whole village. After greeting her family the Kaolack crew wiled away the hours in the shade of a large tent chatting and dancing to some good old fashioned Senegalese drumming until it was time for Mary to greet the whole village in her wedding day best. She was gorgeous in her white complete (the color being one of the few American traditions that were blended into the wedding), and I was glad to see that she chose to skip the dreadful drag queen-esque makeup that Senegalese brides wear in favor of a more natural look. A whole procession of people including her American, Senegalese and volunteer families marched here around to all of the compounds in the village in the heat of the day then retired to the shade while the men went to the mosque to pray.

Eat your heart out Michael Jackson

Lunch was served around 8pm (not a typo, meals at weddings and baptisms are always served really late) and then the real dancing began. There was a group of drummers and a guitarist that played traditional Seereer music, but there was also a DJ with a generator and huge speakers to blast the latest hits. Around 10pm the bride and groom shared their first dance, which I think was another custom borrowed from the states since I haven't seen it at any other Senegalese marriages. After that was the presentation of the gifts, at which point us volunteers gave our gift to the happy couple and then performed the Macarena for the crowd. After that it was dancing until dawn, although we stuffed ourselves into an (even smaller) alham for the journey back to Kaolack a little after midnight.

It was a beautiful day and I'm so glad Mary invited us to share it with her and Malik, and I wish them the best of luck in their new life together.

W.A.I.S.T.

I spent this past weekend in Dakar with almost every other Peace Corps Senegal volunteer and a considerable number from The Gambia, Niger and Mali, for the West African International Softball Tournament. Three full days of softball and three full nights of dancing (until dawn) later and most of us are ready to head back to the village and get back to work. The tournament is divided into a competitive league with teams of high schoolers, embassy officials, and ex-pats, and a social league which is mostly made up of teams from various peace corps regions and countries.

It can be debated that the team "uniforms" in the social league are taken even more seriously than the game itself. This years Kaolack's theme was ballerinas, and although everyone put their own spin on their costume we were all united under one common banner: tutus. The vast array of outfits was a real tribute to both the creativity of Peace Corps volunteers and the ingenuity of Senegalese tailors. Other regions were Cops & Robbers, The Jersey Shore, and Lederhosen. Despite a pretty respectable showing (can YOU field a pop fly wearing nothing but a tutu and boxers with a beer in one hand?) we didn't win any games, but Kaolack was definitely first place for continuity and team spirit. I think our pirouettes could give the Russian ballet a run for its money!

The part of WAIST that Peace Corps volunteers look forward to the most isn't the softball, but the chance to eat something other than rice and millet, and dance to music that doesn't involve drumming on buckets or old ladies wailing. Dakar has a great selection of insanely expensive (on a village salary) but insanely delicious restaurants, and parties are hosted by the Marines, Peace Corps, and the American Club. Since my bedtime in village is no later than 8pm I was worried I wouldn't get to enjoy much of the Dakar nightlife, but I rallied and managed to keep dancing until last call at 5am! I think I was more sore from the dancing than from the softball. It was great to spend a weekend forgetting that I still live in a mud hut and eat birdseed for two meals a day, but I am starting to miss my family and its time for me to get started on the school garden, so its back to the village in a few hours!

Dakars finest: Police officer, banana, Hamburgler

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.

Thanksgiving

  You can't have Thanksgiving without turkey, but here you can't just run down to the local safeway and pick up a perfectly shrink wrapped, hormone enlarged frozen hunk of meat. If you want to do the holiday up right in Senegal you've got to get your hands a little dirty. Thats why, several days ago, I found myself in Keur Madialbel elbow deep in blood doing autopsies on four dead turkeys. Jessica had called me the night before begging for some assistance and I was more than happy to oblige. After all, what could be better than experiencing Thanksgiving like a true pilgrim with a little good old fashioned slaughter.

    I took a car to her town first thing in the morning and we got right down to business. We bought four big fat turkeys from her neighbor which ended up costing us roughly $120 and were just enough to feed the 30+ people coming to Kaolack for Thanksgiving. Then we carried then back to her house, cut off their heads and got down to the dirty business of de-feathering and gutting our future meal. Once the hard work was done we wrapped them up in plastic bags, threw them in a bucket with a couple chunks of ice and loaded it all onto the back of a truck to be driven up to the city and stored in the regional house freezer until the big day.

For two whole days our amazing cooks slaved away to produce one of the most delicious Thanksgiving feasts I've ever had, probably because it was seasoned by the hunger of weeks in village eating rice and bird food. We grilled two turkeys, roasted one and deep fried another as well as making stuffing, mac and cheese, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, corn bread, deviled eggs, cranberry sauce, gravy, apple pie, and pumpkin pie. Some people had requested ingredients in care packages months ago and some things, like cheese, we had to purchase at ridiculously inflated rates ($2 an ounce) so it really was a once in a lifetime meal. Sadly after months of village diets our stomachs were all so shrunken that we couldn't handle all the food we had loaded onto our plates, and most of us ate ourselves sick. We spent the evening sipping sangria and massaging our bulging bellies and trying to fight off the impending food comas.

One of the turkeys had eggs, so I guess I actually murdered 9 turkeys

Tabaski

WARNING: This post contains graphic images, viewer discretion is advised

Oumi, Samba Gaye and Birame in their Tabaski best

  While all of you at home were planning menus and grocery shopping, the people of Senegal were getting ready to celebrate their own Thanksgiving-like holiday; Tabaski. Every family kills a ram in remembrance of Abraham's test of faith where God asked him to sacrifice his son, then they put on their fanciest clothes and sit around eating meat and potatoes and onions until they can no longer fit into said clothes. I was looking forward to Tabaski as a change of pace, but like most Senegalese holidays it was pretty anti-climactic...basically everyone spent so much energy and money in the weeks before getting new clothes made and buying new shoes and picking out their ram that when the actual holiday arrived it was almost a let down. There also wasn't much mention made of the actual reason for the holiday. Tabaski reminded me a lot of Christmas in the US, when everyone is so concerned about shopping and material things that they completely forget the meaning of the holiday in the first place. Even a deeply religious country like Senegal has managed to secularize one of their most important holidays and turn it into nothing more than another reason to spend money on things that they really can't afford. Maybe Senegal and America aren't so different after all.

How many Senegalese men does it take to kill a ram?

As far as holidays go this one certainly won't go down in the history books for me. I spent most of the day trying to eradicate a termite colony that had chewed its way into one of my storage trunks and being interrupted to greet distant relatives that I'll probably never see again. I did take a break to help my family butcher the rams. Since there are 5 adult men living in our compound we killed 5 rams and ended up eating left-over (and increasingly rancid) meat for the next 5 days. I'm in no means a squeamish person and I have no problem killing animals to eat, but after watching the way these animals were dressed (or undressed...) I opted just to eat a bit of the liver and leave it at that. The intestines weren't treated with much care and barely rinsed before being thrown into the bowl of meat which they then contaminated with fecal matter and E coli and who knows what other diseases. As starved as I am for protein in this country I just couldn't convince myself that all of the bacteria would be boiled out of those.

Preparing the onions and potatoes

Turning the mango tree into a slaughterhouse

Sheep's clothing

Why you should be careful when handling small intestine

Bassirou "cleaning" the intestines

Modous fancy pants were a little too big

No meat goes to waste

A 50lb ram reduced to the sum of its parts