Look out for the bones

Yesterday at 4am we sent off Kaya aka “Haby” to Louga, where she will be for a week. I felt so bad for her because she hasn’t been feeling well, but I hope she likes Louga and learns a lot.  5 hours later was the 3 hours of Wolof class (still like Wolof interrogation, but hopefully with more vocab it will start becoming more of a conversation). We have a lot of catching up to do because our class (they divided us into two classes of 9) convinced the Wolof teacher to tell tales out of school about his time teaching Peace Corps volonteers rather than actually teaching Wolof grammar etc. I don’t think I’ve laughed so much during a class in a long time! It was good stress relief if nothing else. I haven’t been speaking much Wolof lately, but yesterday I started practicing again with Maman, and I had another good conversation (as much as I could in Wolof) with our maid, Mariama, who has taken up the “Ngone Ndiaye” name game along with everyone else. This makes me feel more at ease, because I have never been in a situation where there is a maid, so I was not sure how to act towards Mariama, especially since she speaks about as much French as I can speak Wolof. Overall, I’m thankful my family is very indulgent of my curiousity and likes to hang out with me, even if we don’t really go anywhere or do much.

After class, and lunch of the classic Cebbu jen (later this week, I think I’ll need to dedicate a post to the food situation in Senegal, because it is interesting), I went on an expedition to change over more dollars to CFA. This was only my second time ever changing currency, so I wasn’t as savvy as I could have been. Sometimes, I feel inadequate, because people want to speak to me in English if I don’t catch the French the first time, like at the bank. Usually, it’s not the French that’s the problem, but making out the words over all the background noise in Dakar, or if there is a quick topic change in the conversation and I have trouble matching the sounds with the category of words I was expecting to hear. With my learning style preference for visual and my mediocre hearing, it’s also been tough picking up the Wolof at the rate I did French, because I don’t have the recourse of reading books, articles, etc. to learn words as much as in French or in English. Afterwards, as a treat, I bought some Bouye (Baobab fruit) juice for the family and a Jeune Afrique news magazine for myself for when I’m up in the morning and no one else is available to talk.

Even if I was the bumbling American at the bank, I was thankful to have my CFA and that later in the evening, I got to go jogging on the Corniche, one of the nicer paved roads in Dakar that follows the western shoreline. It felt great to do cardio again, to not have to speak any langauge, and to be able to outrun any commentary on the street there may have been. Later in the evening, we had Cebbu jen again, but it was funny because whenever we eat fish, Maman will randomly say in English “Look out for the bones,” the family joke lately. I’m not really a fan eating fish in any form, especially not when it’s staring at me from the plate with its empty eye socket, tail, skin, and lots of small bones. I’m proud to say that I have been able to get over the disgust I have towards fish to the point where I can eat the necessary bites to make my host family happy, and we’ve even turned it into a joke.

As much as we eat fish around here, and I hear random “look out for the bones,” in mealtime conversation at home, it struck me as a good metaphor for what I’ve learned here, on the ground, about culture (I’ve had a lot of unstructured internet-free time here (read, bordeom), so please pardon the metaphor.) So much of our culture is fundamental to who we are and how we operate, like a skeleton, but it is also hidden too. It is great, and interesting to discover, which has made my stay so far in Dakar both fun and informative. But some you come across, and choke on, either because it’s difficult to get around or you weren’t expecting it. For me, it’s been the difficulty of planning my day, an essential part of my life in the States, when few people around me here regularily plan, or at least make plans in ways that I’m aware of and understand.Hopefully, as I get better at “looking out for the bones” and learn more about the day-to-day life of Senegalese people, I’ll be able to incorporate the things I want to do and places I want to do with everyone else’s days. In the meantime, at least I have jogging now as an option to fight the cabin fever I get so easily and the mental boredom should go away as I start pondering my research questions for my paper and finding ways to get answers for them. Also, I’m curious to see how daily life changes when school starts up, as everyone in my host family is either a student or a teacher, the start of school should bring some interesting happenings and news.

Look forward to more news soon! Salutations