8 Days of the Week

Well it’s been almost a week. Did anyone miss me? I’ll tell you what I missed… an internet connection! I guess I’ll have to get used to that. I just got back from almost a week with my CBT homestay family. It was intense. Fun, but also intense. Once we got to site, Peace Corps pretty much just started throwing people off of the bus. I’m glad I wasn’t the first person; I think I would have freaked.

My homestay family is really great. As soon as I arrived, my “mother” told me that I was now just another one of her daughters. Also, one of my little sisters called me pretty the other day, and I just about melted. My family has had PCVs before. A year ago they had a married couple (Samba and Koomba) who now serve up north near the Mauritania border, and in the last PST they had a guy volunteer (Demba). Within the first hour that I was there, my mom had called Koomba to tell him that he now had a new “sister.” It was very reassuring to talk to him. He told me how lucky I was since my family is super awesome.

I have been given a new Senegalese name, so I am no longer Rachel. Here in Senegal my name is Penda Ba (Ba is my family name). It took a really long time before I got what they were trying to tell me. Once I did, everyone got very excited and started clapping. It sort of made me feel like a 5 year-old (this language barrier is very frustrating!). My family does speak French, but since I really don’t, I’m not sure how helpful that’s going to be (I hope I don’t wind up speaking some weird dialect that half French, half Pulaar). Luckily, my aunt speaks English! Yay! But I want to try really hard to not use that as a crutch. I want to be able to be all Pulaar, all the time. I’m still trying to figure out the family structure, but here’s what I have so far.

I have

• A grandmother, “Mama”
• My mother, “Neene”
• An aunt
• 4 sisters (I think); a 20 year-old (she has a one-month old daughter, my niece and a husband who lives with us too), a 16 year-old, a 9 year-old and a 5 year-old.
• 2 or 3 brothers (the jury’s still out on that one), I have no idea how old they are.

I don’t have names at this point. I know, I know, that’s really bad. I’m working on it, I swear!

The house that I live in is super nice for Senegalese standards, or so I’ve been told. There is electricity, although the power goes out often. I don’t have pictures right now, but I will take some when we go back on Wednesday. I can tell you that we have a Turkish style toilet (google it if you wants pics) and a well that I have to draw water from every time I want to take a shower (aka bucket bath. They are surprisingly refreshing!). I’m not going to go into the boring mundane details of what my normal everyday is like, instead I will recount some stories (both good and bad) for your entertainment.

Have you seen my lost Toubab

I’m not sure if I already mentioned this in a previous post, but “toubab” is a derogatory word for a white person or foreigner. I’ve had it yelled at me a lot over the past few days, occasionally accompanied by a rock hitting my shoulder or the back of my leg (no worries, a little bruising never hurt anyone).

But I digress, this is not a story of injury and sadness, but one of hilarity.

My friend Emma has had a hard time finding her way around our village (no judgment, to be perfectly fair, I still think that all of the houses/streets look the same. It is pure luck that the time when I have gotten lost, I have been with another PCV and have been able to blame them. LOL, JK). Over the past few days when Emma has gotten lost, word has spread that there is a lost toubab wondering the streets and one of her family members has come to get her. We all think that is incredibly entertaining and laugh about it often. I feel like I’m not doing this story justice, maybe it doesn’t translate well. I swear it was funny at the time.

Just swallow (no, there is no sexual connotation here)

My very first night at my homestay I had an eating issue. Just to give you some cultural background, in Senegal, lunch and dinner are served out of a big communal bowl. Everyone either uses their right hand or a spoon to eat. It is considered rude to reach into another person’s section of the bowl. The elder at the bowl will take pieces out of the middle (that’s where all the good stuff is; fish, carrot, bitter tomato, potato, etc.) and throw them into different sections of the bowl.

So, at my first meal, a questionable piece of meat was thrown in my direction. Bear in mind that we also eat at around 9pm and it is dark and you can’t really tell what you’re eating. Not wanting to be rude, I picked it up with my spoon, put it in my mouth and started to chew. I think I ate goat. And questionable goat at that. It was not pleasant. All I could do was try not to gag and swallow it as quickly as possible. I thought that spitting it out would be very culturally insensitive, not to mention make me look like an ass**** my very first night with my new family. Senegal is not for the weak of stomach. Boy do I miss Westville NYC!

Ouch!

I don’t mean to make generalizations, but a lot of Senegalese children that I have encountered are rude. And not just the harmless kind of rude like when they snicker behind your back and stare as you walk by. The physical kind, where they pinch you and throw rocks at your head. Part of our training is in gardening and sustainability. Therefore, we are responsible for starting a garden in our CBT communities. It is obvious that at the school in which we are doing our planting, that previous PC groups have tried… and failed. No wonder, the kids are supremely unhelpful for the most part. The other day, as we were getting water for the garden, a gang of children ran up to my friend Meredith and started pinching her arms. She had a watering can in each hand and was not able to fend them off. One of them drew blood! To her credit, she remained very calm and handled the situation a heck of a lot better then I would have.

When we told our language instructor, Sidy, he told us that we should hit the nasty children with sticks. Uhhh…what?!?! He demonstrated this for us the next day. A little boy threw something at us and Sidy went to chase him with a stick. The boy jumped through a window and into a classroom and Sidy broke the stick on the windowsill and then jumped in after the boy! Don’t worry, no one was harmed

Legendary!

Hailey fell on her butt when we were gardening. She went to jump on the shovel to get it to go farther into the ground, and she totally ate it. Sorry Hailey, but it was hilarious. The end. 

Asalaa maalekum,

Rachel