Family Times

After a month in Dakar, I finally decided to start a blog. I hope that I'm not too late in the game, but with my awful memory I would love to look back on something and remember little tidbits of my time here.

First thing I fell in love with here: my host family. Having a very traditional, Senegalese host family here is one of the most incredible, odd, and out of character experience I've had so far. First of all, the house is huge, with three full floors and a fourth floor currently being constructed for future family members. It's a beautiful, reddish pink building with flowers and a pretty little garden out in the front, and the side door 90% of the time open, which makes people coming in and out of the house so much easier. The household is extremely fluid, with random friends and relatives constantly flowing in and out, greeting each other and catching up.

Maman Thérèse is the head of the household since her husband, who was the first professor of psychiatry in Senegal, died years ago. I keep calling her "my grandma" to my friends since she reminds me so much of my grandmother back home in New York, since both of them are forces to be reckoned with. Maman is in charge of a household of two babies (Babacar Mamour and Dieme Ana), three little girls (Arame Yvonne, Bebe Aida and Xena Wa), three sisters (Thérèse Sow, Thérèse Faye, and Mami Jo), five brothers (Lex, Vicky, Babacar, Petit and Victor), two uncles (Djibi and Bou), two aunts (Adji and Tatan Aida), two live-in maids (Mai, who's 17, and a new one whose name I forgot), and me -- 21 in total, all under one roof, and amazingly enough, it never feels crowded. There's also Soda, a gorgeous, tall and thin girl who comes in to cook and wash clothes for us everyday, and she always has her adorable baby wrapped around her back as she does the laundry. The maids are really a part of the family, and Mai and I have managed to become friends despite the huge language barrier between my awful French, her awful French, and my extremely limited Wolof.

I've also become close to all my brothers, who have ataaya almost every night with their friends. Drinking ataaya is such a specific Senegalese thing, which is interesting because the tea is a gun powder green tea that's imported from China. What makes it so Senegalese is the social context in which people drink it and the pretty way they prepare the tea, pouring it back and forth between two small glass cups so that there is enough foam in each cup. People flock around a pot of ataaya being prepared, even when most of the time they're not drinking much at all, and mostly sit around and chat.

The three little girls are adorable, even when they're being brats, and one of my favorite times of the day is when I come home from school and I hear a chorus of "Tatan Kat!!! Tatan Kat!!" as they rush down to hug me. I don't know when I became this soft, but I think Senegal is turning me into a family-person. It's amazing how much I love being in such a bustling, large family, considering I'm used to a quiet, small, nuclear-family household, and in general need my me-time. (That said, I miss my family home in New York, and I want to wish my sister Linda luck on her new internship in Arizona/Nevada, which she's starting soon!!)

There's a lot I can say about the last month of my time here, and it's a shame I didn't start this blog earlier. The blog I tried to start in Paris last summer was an utter failure because I never wanted to share interesting things from my day-to-day, and instead I focused too much time on naval-gazing. The thing that's different about Dakar is that life here is such a departure from anywhere I've ever been, and so I'm constantly surrounded by a sensory overload. After having lived here for a month (and for three weeks properly in this house in Ouakam, a more village-like area in the northwest of Dakar) I've gotten used to a lot of the physical, superficial aspects of living in Dakar, like the fact that sheep/goats walk around the streets, the fact that there's sand EVERYWHERE, the architecture, the fact that my house is almost never locked, the greetings (which can sometimes be a loooong process), eating on the floor around a bowl, the starchy, heavy diet, etc.

Beyond the more obvious aspects of Senegalese culture, I'm just starting to understand the nuances of the society in a more layered way than I thought I would. One of my brothers, Vicky, just spent the last half hour after dinner explaining their extended family tree to me, and it made me dizzy just thinking about how many people he has to keep track of. There are Sereres, Lebous, Peuls, Diolas and French people all in the same family, even though Maman Thérèse and her family specifically comes from one village called Djembering. The relationship that the members of the family have to each other, even when usually they are only distantly related, is really beautiful to see, and it's easy to understand how they accept me as part of their family, even if only temporarily.

The other aspects of my life are great as well -- classes are pretty good (I'm taking Wolof, French, Senegalese Culture and Society, Public Health, and an internship class in which I spend my Fridays working in a private charity Poste de Santé that's run by Catholic sisters), program people are great, I'm slowly starting to make some neighborhood friends, and there's a lot of beaching, beautiful weather and meeting strangers. I've experienced some of the nightlife here already, which is pretty fun, but nightlife doesn't interest me nearly as much as all the rest does.

The first week that I moved in here was full of uncomfortable encounters, not knowing much about the family or the way of life in Senegal, but gladly, I think I'm past that. I'm a pro at taking car rapides, which are these junky, windowless and incredibly colorful vans that I take to and from Ouakam, school and downtown Dakar, which I think gives me at least some Senegalese street cred. I try to incorporate as much Wolof in my daily life as possible, and my French is improving, albeit sloooowly. I have my ups and downs as I navigate Dakar, but it's definitely feeling a lot less like a strange new world and a lot more like home.