Sorry I haven’t written in a while, I’ve just been preoccupied by Senegal’s AWESOMENESS. No seriously, I’ve actually been pretty busy with my internship, traveling around Dakar, and having Senegalese family time. So far things have been really great, and I’m absolutely loving Senegal.
As I said in my last email, our family here is HUGE, and it’s taken the three of us Americans a while just to figure out who everyone is and who they’re related. In our house alone, there are like 15 people at any given time. Our host mom, Mère Diagne, pretty much runs the household. It took us a while to figure out where Père Diagne was, but we finally found out from our host borthers that he’s actually on a UN Peacekeeping mission in Abidjan right now, monitoring Côte D’Ivoire’s upcoming presidential elections. The three Diagne brothers all live at our house. The oldest is Matar, and he and his wife Yacine have an ADORABLE 9-mo-old son named Omar. Our brother Médoune is 29 and actually used to work at the non-profit I’m interning at, but now does website maintenance/design somewhere in Dakar. Lamine, who’s 20, is the baby. He’s in university in Dakar and is ridiculously goofy. Their sister Fatou and her husband live really close by, and their daughters Djiegen (8) and Khary (4) are on summer break right now so they’re at the house pretty much everyday. The Diagne’s two other sisters are both abroad right now — Grassé is at uni in Morocco, and Sény lives in Italy with her husband. Their adorable daughter Ro is living in Dakar with us right now though so she can learn Wolof. Yacine’s niece is staying with us too, and then there’s also Mère Diagne’s niece Nabou and her daughter Mami Chou, who live there permanently. Throw various cousins/friends/neighbors and the three American interns (me, Natalie & Salah) into the mix, and yeah, there’s quite a few people hanging out.
It’s great though, because our family is totally Senegalese and thereby totally fun. They play aweomse Senegalese music all the time, and Nabou and Lamine have been teaching us Senegalese dancing, which is CRAZY (YouTube example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEkXO-UPvco) We also get to see lots of Senegalese TV, which is usually either dubbed soap operas from France, Mexico (Africa LOVES telenovellas!), or India (Google “Allo Bombay”), OR Senegalese wrestling. I have never considered myself a wrestling fan, but Lammb, the traditional Senegalese wrestling, is SUPER fun, mostly because before every match the two competitors and their respective posses have a DANCE-OFF. I kid you not. This is a mild example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-nbnwFu_oY. We’re scheming to get to a live match sometime in the next 5 weeks.
Other awesome bits of Senegalese culture… well, in general everyone here is just SUPER FLY. Dressing well is part of their culture, so people generally are either dressed in really chic Western clothes, or in colorful traditional boubous. Nabou’s best friend is getting married on Saturday, so yesterday Salah, Natalie, and I all went to market to get fabric to bring to the tailor so we’ll have boubous to wear. SO excited!!! The food here is also amazing. It’s really spicy and rich and generally delicious. At meals, they lay a blanket on the ground and put a big bowl or plate with all the food in it in the middle, then everyone circles around and shares. Typically, then everyone finishes quickly and gets up and makes us Americans finish the rest. They are unapologetically trying to fatten us up… everyone is constantly telling Natalie and I we need to work on our “jaay fonde”, aka, big butts, which are a prized female attribute in Senegal. “Fonde” is actually a porridge made from millet flour that the women eat to get the “jaay fonde”, and “jaay” means container… so the word for big butt literally translates as “porridge container.” Gotta love Senegalese humor.
What else, what else… hm, well it’s worth noting that even though we live in a super urban area, our neighborhood is an ancient fishing village where there are still fishermen and farmers. So, it’s not uncommon to see people herding sheep or cattle down the main highway or giving goats baths at the beach. Photographic proof to follow. In general though, it’s a pretty good mix of traditional and modern African culture, which also means we have wi-fi pretty much all the time, so I can Skype whenever WOO
Long post, I’ll shut up now, and also it’s almost dinner and I don’t want to miss THAT.
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