I spent two days and two nights last week in Popenguine, a village at the beginning of the Senegal’s Petite Cote. It’s famous for an apparition of a Black Virgin Mary and is therefore a place where many Senegalese Catholic pilgrims go. We were there for the Day of the Ascension (honestly, although my family is a member of the Ascension parish in Manhattan I don’t know exactly what that means. If I remember my catechism right, it’s the day Mary ascended directly to heaven, without dying first or something miraculous like that.) which is the biggest day of the Catholic calendar here excepting Christmas and Easter. The village also has some nice beaches. We rented a beach house, bought a case of beer, and had ourselves a good time. I have never been much of a beach person, I figured I was born tanned, I don’t like sand (and when you go to the beach sand gets everywhere, to the point that you will still find sand in your at the bottom of your backpack from that time you went to Orchard Beach in 2004) and I can’t swim. Being in Senegal, however, I have felt incredibly pale and have been to the beach much more often in an attempt to find my “true” color. As a result, the beach is starting to grow on me. This too brief a stay at a beach house confirmed it. I still can’t swim and I still don’t like sand, but waking up to the calm but loud sound of waves crashing onshore is so much nicer than the shrill ringing of my alarm clock. Thursday afternoon I went for a walk along the beach, and with the waves crawling back and forth over my feet I felt like life could not get any better. It would have been a perfect scene for a Club Med advertisement had there not been a line of trash dragged by the tide to the middle of the sand.
The Ascension Day celebration was at some sort of community center. There was an open square lined with plastic chairs with tents to (mercifully) shade the audience. The celebration reminded me that the Catholic Church will pretty much just let you worship however you want as long as you put up a picture of a White Jesus and send your money to Rome. A group of drummers and dancers performed “traditional” music and dance. After the dancers went through the choreographed sets the crowd joined in dancing. It felt rude not to dance so we too got up there and tried to imitate some of the moves. Popenguine is a Sereer village, and the Sereer have (obviously) different music and dance traditions than the Wolof. Unlike the acrobatics of mbalax—which from what I understand comes from traditional Wolof dancing—Sereer dancing is more controlled although no less energetic. After we got tired of dancing Caitlin suggested we try to name the dances; my suggestions: “the gumby,” “the funky African chicken,” “the look-a-mouse-leap,” “the ass-in-the-air-turkey-shuffle” and “the butterfly-pop.”
It also helped that everyone was drinking. I am amazed by how much Christianity here is associated with alcohol. I have an ever-growing suspicion that in an overwhelmingly Muslim country the French missionaries decided that if they let people drink they could attract more converts. I could never imagine people drinking so much alcohol at any Church event in the US or even in the “alcohol-positive” “Land of the Most Self-Hating Black People on the Planet.” And at Protestant events, especially the evangelical ones it is just unfathomable. But people were drinking right in front of the creepy looking white priest. Here it is like being Christian means that you drink and eat pork. My host family is Catholic (and Sereer from the same region as Popenguine) and therefore I have met many Senegalese Catholics and they always stress that yes they drink and yes they eat pork. But when I see pictures of Jesus at the bar I think people are taking it just a little too far. Either way, unlike the US I would love to go to a bible camp here.
