My Keur Massyla Village Stay

Okay, an update, for real this time! I’m so sorry it took so long but I have a long list of what I consider good excuses, the main one being I’m having a great time. I’ve done SO much since we last spoke (or, rather, since you last read my ramblings)!

Thursday: We departed on our bus and arrived at Lac Rose, a lake where the reflected light makes the water look pink and where people mine salt, in the late morning. We had 20 minutes there just to look around and take pictures, but then continued on our way to Thiès. Immediately upon arrival in Thiès everyone noticed a HUGE transformation from Dakar—this was a beautiful city! I’m not sure how to describe the differences, they just almost didn’t compare; the architecture/layout was very different, there wasn’t sand lining every street and sidewalk, there was much less trash and even some trees/grass…it was just gorgeous and made me really realize how different Dakar is from the cities I’m used to in the US. We ate a delicious lunch Chez Joe: Pamanda (Joe is the owner, Pamela and Amanda are, I think, his two daughters?) and then were set loose in the Thiès market. It was much smaller than those in Dakar and I wasn’t being constantly grabbed and yelled at to come look/buy things…so it was wonderful. I walked around with some friends for a while, we bought homestay gifts for our village-families-to-be, and after talking to a couple Peace Corps volunteers about their experiences in Senegal, we left for our village stays.
Upon arrival in Keur Sedaro (the name of the larger village, made up of many compounds (mine was Keur Massyla)) we saw hundreds of villagers gathered in this building in a circle, with a circle of empty chairs. We got off the bus to find that the chairs were for us. It was kind of like a little ceremony or ritual or something—Souleye stood in the middle of the circle and would name off one student along with one village family name, and the mother of the family would come into the circle and hug her student, grab their hand, and everyone would cheer as they walked away towards their home.
The walk to my home was a little awkward: my brother wouldn’t let me carry my own bags (my brother Moudou, 18, carried my giant backpack while my little sister, Fanta, carried my 6-pack of water), and my mom, Aida Gaye, held my hand the whole time, but we didn’t really talk because, as I mentioned in a previous post, people here (for the most part) only spoke Wolof.
When I got to my house, after introductions and things like that (and a TON of repeating introductions/names), I was left in my room with a bunch of young teens, unable to really communicate but using the little Wolof I have to find out a little about them. After quite a while of kind of awkward small talk/silence, they eventually said, “Where’s the gift?” Apparently that’s what they had been waiting for, and once I got out the bags of gifts a bunch of people who had been waiting outside rushed in to check them out. My mother kept saying, “My child, she is good! She is good!” So I guess the gifts I chose, while definitely were not enough in my opinion in the end, were very much appreciated.
Here is a semi-accurate breakdown of my family (those I met, anyway):
Aida Gaye: mother
Ibrahima Thiaw: father
Abdoulaye Thiaw: brother: 23
Moudou Thiaw: brother: 18
Ibrahima Thiaw: brother
Fanta Thiaw: sister: 8
Ndoiye Thiaw: sister: 2

and I know the mother has 2 more kids that I may or may not have met, but there were also many people who seemed to live there (or just hang out there a lot) that I’m pretty sure weren’t related. I was also Ndoiye Thiaw, named after the 2-year-old, and I had a lot of trouble remembering my name whenever anyone asked (it was said something like n-doya, which is hard for me to remember in the first place). Anyway it was very confusing for many reasons when I first arrived, but everyone was very sweet and welcoming and excited to show me things. I was treated with the most hospitality I can imagine, to the point of discomfort to me: everywhere I went, Fanta or another young child would be following me with a chair. This could be when I exited my room to go hang out outside with the family; when I went to the kitchen to watch/help with cooking; when I joined my brothers in their room to look at pictures or drink tea; when I crossed the village to visit Megan and her family; when I went to brush my teeth…and if I said oh, no, I don’t need that, they would stand there and say “Toggal!” (sit down!) until I gave in…just really unnecessary but very sweet.
My first meal was a huge surprise to me: the normal fish, the normal rice, but with that a HUGE pile of BEAUTIFUL, drumroll please, VEGETABLES!! There were carrots and eggplants and potatoes and turnips and tomatoes, ah just a heaven of veggies! I ate with my brother Moudou, who I think noticed that I chose the veggies over the fish when eating out of the communal bowl, so for the rest of the stay he would put more veggies in my portion of the plate ☺
Oh, and you know how in my last village stay, to my great surprise, people had televisions and watched soap operas? I’m sure you guessed it: they did here, too. It was a big thing at night to go over to Megan’s family’s house where they’d bring out the TV and everyone would watch this one soap opera they call Barbara, which I think is Spanish but dubbed in French, interesting since almost nobody there spoke French…

Friday: (Side note: at 5:30 AM I heard this weird noise on my roof (after hearing a lot of weird noises throughout the night, this did not surprise me) that sounded like rocks hitting the tin. I listened for a while and realized it sounded strangely like rain, and, very skeptical of this idea since I have seen no precipitation since I got here, I opened my door and stepped outside: IT WAS RAIN!!! It lasted for about 5 minutes and then ended, but it was so amazing to feel rain!)
I got a lot of really interesting village experiences on Friday, and overall had a great day; at the same time I experienced the frustrations of a completely different culture where privacy doesn’t exist. In the morning I got to help cook: Fanta taught me how to scale/gut/de-bone a fish, so I helped with that. I also used the mortar/pestle to smash things, which is one of my new favorite hobbies. I was a little bit grossed out by some of the sanitary issues of cooking, I shall list some examples: the little boy Babacar who hangs out around the house constantly had a lot of fun trying to communicate with me and just watch me try to cook, and would play with the raw, bloody fish soaking in bloody water and then take his hands out and rub them on my arms; The veggies were soaked in this raw bloody fish water before being put in the pot, which was fine since they were being cooked, but sometimes people would take one out of the bloody water to take a bite and put it back; it was just a very different experience of cooking for me than at home, obviously, so it took some getting used to (or rather some looking away) but was a really interesting experience.
In the mid-day I was feeling the need to write or take a little rest from the constant noise and grabbing of little kids, so I got out my journal to write a little. I sat down in my chair and immediately was surrounded by kids! They just wanted to watch me write (almost nobody was literate, especially not in English so I’m sure watching me write was pretty interesting), and they wanted me to read what I was writing aloud sometimes, or write random words in Wolof (even though Wolof is not a written language, so I just had to sound everything out). But after an unsuccessful journaling I wanted to take a nap, and they could tell I was tired so they told me to go take a rest. I was relieved and entered my room to lay down on my bed, and as soon as I did everyone filed in around my room and stood there to watch me take a rest. This, I must say, was one of the most uncomfortable moments of my life. Needless to say my nap did not last long.
Later I visited Megan at her house where we got a tiny bit of privacy to talk about our experiences/frustrations, and then joined a huge group of mostly boys to drink some tea. We played some clapping games and they sang us some songs, they asked us questions in Wolof about our lives/ages/relationship status/etc. During one of the clapping games the kid playing in front of me, facing me, fell backwards and hit his arm on the hot stove used for heating the water for tea—immediately people started yelling at me in Wolof, saying it had been my fault and that I needed to apologize! I was shocked; not only had I not done it, I was being screamed at in a language I didn’t understand well and certainly could not respond in—I just got really overwhelmed really quickly and wasn’t sure how to handle the situation!
Later my brother Moudou told me we were going to do some exercise, so we went and got Megan and Avery (who both lived in my area) and went on the weirdest jog of my life. There were 3 or 4 senegalese kids, the oldest was Moudou (18), and us 3 toubabs. We jogged down a path in a wide open field for about 4 minutes before stopping and eating some maniocs. We sat and stretched, kicked around the soccer ball we brought for a couple minutes, and instead of continuing like we imagined, we just stayed there. Megan’s mom came out to get her for her 3rd cup of tea, so Avery and I were left talking with the kids about our lives. One of them actually spoke some French so it was a little easier to communicate. Eventually we returned and started up a game of soccer which quickly grew to have about 10 people on each team; I scored a couple goals, but it was really difficult because it was on a sand field, which makes it IMPOSSIBLE to run and a lot of sand was going in my eyes. But it felt great to play soccer and it was a really fun way to get to experience village life.
When I went home my family made me take a shower, which was a bucket of cold water that I scooped onto myself out in the outhouse.
Oh, another thing I experienced: the photo culture in the village. This was, to me, insane. Bizarre. Really unexpected and really overwhelming. The older kids (mid-teens) had kept doing this one motion to me the night before, putting their hands up to their eyes and kind of making a telescope shape with their hands…eventually I figured out that meant, do you have a camera? And I wanted to have pictures so of course I said yes--- it turned out to be a) a little controversial as to when/when not to take photos and b) very scary. I think the timing of photos basically had to do with how many kids were there (if there were too many it wasn’t good because EVERYONE wanted to be in EVERY photo and it got kind of violent) and how riled up people were. The second I got out my camera every kid in sight (and then some) would appear and RUSH towards the camera, yelling, “PHOTO MA! PHOTO MA!” So I would then take one picture of this crowd of screaming kids and immediately after they heard the click every single one would leap towards the camera, grabbing at it and grabbing at me and pressing buttons to try to see the picture I had just taken. This, for me, made me really uncomfortable in 2 ½ ways: 1) I felt like a rich white tourist, 2) I felt very afraid my camera would be ruined, and 2 ½) I felt very snobby and selfish for even THINKING of the state of my technology while these people could barely afford clothes to wear. This thought crossed my mind a lot and developed throughout my whole stay, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it.

Saturday: I did some more cooking, and got another intense photo-session because Megan’s camera died and I offered to take pictures of her and her family. (The villagers here absolutely LOVE looking at photos of themselves; the student who stayed with my family in Spring 2008 sent a whole book of photos she had taken and my family took this book out multiple times per day just to look through them, not always to show me. So I didn’t want Megan’s family to miss out on getting photos, nor did I want Megan not to have photos of her family!)
Oh, each morning my mom or my brother would take me all around the village to visit every family member and a bunch of friends. I couldn’t figure out if this was something they did every morning or if it was just for me to meet people, but a lot of times we’d stop in someone’s room for a long time while they talked and I just sat there, it was interesting to see so many different houses and family structures.
I also had a lot of reflection going on on Saturday, since it was my last day there. I won’t go into it all but the basic theme was generosity vs. materialism and wealth.
Before my shower on Saturday I gathered water 4 or 5 times, carrying a little bucket on my head, and got a lot of comments from the village men.
Saturday night was the “Tam-tam,” or dance party, hosted in the toubabs’ favor. I was a little scared of this idea but it turned out to be very fun. Beforehand, though, I was brought into my room by my mom and another woman her age and stripped (had I not been wearing a tanktop and spandex pants underneath my clothes I would have been EXTREMELY uncomfortable and not sure I would have dealt with it--there was a crowd gathered outside my door (or curtain, rather), watching me get changed) and dressed in Senegalese clothing: a traditional undergarment, which was basically just a wrap skirt made out of big netting, and a lime-green boubou, which included a shirt and wrap skirt. I was feeling a little ridiculous and like my privacy had been invaded but then Megan arrived wearing a white boubou with hot pink polka dots and a matching headband, so that made me feel much better. We walked and gathered the other toubabs in our area and walked to the tam-tam.
The tam-tam was basically a ton of Senegalese dancing, usually each toubab with one member of his/her family. I usually am not one to dance but I much prefer Senegalese dance to the kind of dancing I’ve been forced into in the U.S.; everyone just really gets into it and looks kind of ridiculous (maybe not to people who know how to do it, but to us toubabs) and everyone has a good time without judging others. So that was fun and didn’t last nearly as long as I expected.
That night, since it was my last night there, a bunch of people gathered in my room after dinner for tea and discussion. The limited conversation consisted of members of my family saying they would cry when I left, asking if I liked Senegal, asking where I was going when I left, etc. It was nice to just hang out with my family and eventually, after I got too tired to think in Wolof, I went to bed.

Sunday: This was a sad day; I had grown very attached to my family, they were all SO generous and sweet and just genuinely wonderful people, and after only this short a time (that seemed oh-so-long at some points) I was leaving them. To make a long story short, I cried, my mom cried, all the goodbyes were dragged out for far too long which never helps, Moudou gave me his bracelet through the window of the bus…I don’t really want to re-live it but it was a sad goodbye. I hate goodbyes in general, but especially in languages I don’t speak, where I can’t fully voice my appreciation to these people.
We went to our hostel after leaving the village, where I found out we had wireless internet! What a change from the village, within 15 minutes of leaving! We spent the day near Thiès, going to a glass-painting workshop and meeting the artist/seeing a demonstration, going to a basket market, and then to the same market we had gone to a few days before, in Thiès. We then met up at Chez Joe for dinner and had PIZZA!! I actually mostly ate a giant plate of vegetables, I can’t seem to get enough when they’re finally offered.

So this takes me to the end of the village stay, and unfortunately I’m too tired to write the rest of this blog entry tonight. I promise I’ll finish soon though! I know you’re probably sick of my promises for more, but really, I’ll try to write about Saint Louis soon. I miss you all ☺