The Village

Two weeks ago I went with my host family to their village. Palmarin is a collection of 5 villages in Senegal’s Petite Cote where most Sereer come from. The region is also has a large numbers of Catholic and is famous for its beaches and for Joal, the hometown of the famous French language poet and first president of Senegal, Leopold Senghor. I only had to hear that little factoid about a dozen times from everyone I met before memorizing it. I went with my host mom and Alphonse (who at this point should require no introduction). We got up early and took a station wagon shared taxi to Mbour, the resort town at the entrance to the region. There we switched to a “car rapide,” which was fine until we ran out of paved highway. The rest of the ride was a hot, bumpy, cramped, dusty, slow jaunt along the coast. I learned that my host mom can be as bossy with random strangers as she is at home when she smacked some teenage boy upside the head while we were stopping to pick up yet another passenger by the side of the road when there was already no space in the bus.

Palmarin-Gundamane reminded me of Moca. Like in all of my previous “village” experience (Moca has become mon village in Senegal, and “The Most Self-Hating Group of Black People on the Planet” mon ethnie) I spent all of my time reading on the porch, chilling with a bunch of old women who congregate every day at the same place to alternate gossiping and staring at each other in silence, eating too much, smacking at mosquitoes and failing, and sleeping too much. Time just seems to drag in villages. After I had finished my book and taken a nap and had gone to the beach I just had no idea what to do. But villages solve that problem quickly too. I was handed several beers and then had three or four neighbors bring me dinner. I was hoping my stomach wouldn’t burst as I tried to eat enough from the fourth plate to satisfy the cook that I really did like her plate of greasy rice, pork and sauce as much as everyone else’s greasy rice, pork and sauce but really I was just that stuffed.

Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting started two weeks ago. Palmarin is a mostly Catholic village and the small Catholic minority in Senegal seems like they want to shove it in the Muslims’ faces that yes they drink, and eat pork and insist on doing so more during Ramadan when the Muslims fast. I have never eaten here as much pork as I did that weekend.

After I got my nose out of the plates I realized that it was pitch-black around me. Palmarin just recently got electricity (still waiting on running water, for now they get all of their water from the well) but all of the houses I went to only had one or two dim blue light-bulbs that allowed you to see that there were other people in the room but not much more than that. Once out of the houses we were walking by moonlight. When I got back to where we were staying (there were also the obligatory “village visits” to ancient aunts and crazy uncles) I found out that there were no electrical outlets meaning no fan and nowhere to charge my phone. That night I sweat myself to sleep, with the fatigue from all that pork and beer eventually overcoming the heat and my fear of sleeping without a mosquito net in a West African village with several pools of standing water.

For the ride back we waited by in the hardware store across the dirt road for a bus to come. It took a good two hours to come, but fortunately it was relatively empty and the return trip was somewhat more comfortable. It took about four hours to get back to Dakar after stopping something like 50 times to pick people and drop them off at random spots along the road. When we arrived at Mbour we saw that it had rained, but it looked like only drizzle. I was happy cause rain meant that it was cooler and that the dirt would settle as hard mud than as dust on my backpack and my t-shirt. Then when we got off by the highway near my house and started walking home, it starting pouring. I felt bad for my host mom cause she was carrying a large sac full of Senegalese couscous on her head (to resell), but seconds after seeing the drops fall softly on my glasses the rain was so heavy that I couldn’t even see her behind me.

Dakar Village

Dakar is greener now that it has rained, but it still remains a dusty brown place where it is impossible to get fresh air and greenery i.e. it lacks park space. Yet after a cursory search for green space I think I have found something far more interesting than the Senegalese Central Park. My host father always mentioned going to the jardin and last week I went with him to check it out. It turns out that for some reason (I can’t believe that in a city with as tight a housing market as Dakar the real estate developers haven’t gotten to it) there is a village in the middle of Dakar. Now I don’t know how big it is yet, or how aware people are of it, but it was disorienting to leave the city and suddenly enter a village after turning right off a random street where it bends left. If not for the ubiquitous trash—as usual mostly plastic bags, bottles and wrappers along with car tires and the random torn flip flop—and the tall apartment buildings at the horizon I could have confused the lettuce and cucumber fields, the thatched huts and open-air, wood-lit stoves for rural Senegal. I chilled with my host father and his crew of old drunks, one of who got angry at me for trying to learn Wolof instead of Sereer (of course if you ask Wolof people they say that everyone in Senegal is happy speaking Wolof). Another of his friends was “nice” enough to buy me a bottle of “sum sum.” I say “nice” because that stuff is lethal. In the southern more tropical regions of Senegal it is made from distilled cashew. In Dakar Village they make it with water, sugar and yeast which they then boil and distill. They showed me the tall barrels that had already been mixed and were ready to be boiled. It tastes like if you were too leave some bread dipped in water for a week and then drank the water with some gin. In fact they referred to it as “African gin” or “African tequila” depending on which old drunk you ask. My teacher told me that drinking that stuff will make you grow crazy, when they started pouring it out of an old bottle of motor oil I thought he might be right. There are also some pig pens (and the accompanying odor) and some of the old men also have large grills set up to smoke fish. In fact, earlier they had slaughtered a pig and when I showed up, in addition to drinking they insisted that I eat which was cool except that I had to eat with my hand. I am not at all opposed to eating with your hands except that the rice here is so greasy (I am talking Havana-level greasy) that the grease drips down your forearm when you ball it up to raise it to your mouth. Which brings me to an amazing fact: