A selection of anecdotes for your enjoyment

I witnessed my first street fight this past week. I was sitting in My Shop, an internet café (more like an internet fast food restaurant if you want to get technical) and these two men outside started hitting each other until one was bleeding profusely. A crowd gathered, but no one seemed to call the police, probably because Dakar traffic is always so obscenely jammed that there was no chance of the police arriving.

I’ve never had any desire to be bulimic, but at dinner a few nights ago I was force-fed such absurd quantities that afterwards I wanted very much to stick my finger down my throat and vomit it all up.

I’ve developed mad skills at killing inch-long cockroaches by flashlight during power outages. I’ve also discovered the necessity of shaking out my hairbrush for ants each morning.

Alice (you’ll hear a lot more about her in this and later posts) and I were sitting on the sidewalk in the middle of Dakar under the shade of a parked car (yes, the car was parked entirely on the sidewalk) waiting for a bus (literally a bus, not the bus, because we didn’t know what bus we were waiting for) when a one-legged man sitting on a skateboard rolled up to us to ask for money, and instead of giving him some coins, Alice just started chatting with him in Wolof (she took a course last semester in the US). Because why wouldn’t you start chatting with a one-legged stranger who rides around on a skateboard when you’re sitting in the middle of a sidewalk waiting for a bus in Dakar?

The Wolof word for gay translates to ‘manwoman’. According to my Wolof professor, there are no lesbians in Senegal.

I learned to make Thieboudienne the other day. One of my jobs was to pick miniature ants out of the bag of uncooked rice. I definitely didn’t get all of them. I guess I’ve been eating bugs every meal. I also had to mortar and pestle and entire half of a frozen fish, skin, bones, and all. The resulting bony pulp was made into fishballs.

One of my host family’s maids has developed an unhealthy fascination with my hair. She’s ruffled it four times in the past two days. She’s also asked if I shampoo with olive oil. Two other people have also examined my hair in the past few days. One was eight, the other three. The three-year-old has an excuse. The eight year old, maybe not so much.

I saw a man wearing a boubou and boat shoes. It’s a pretty snazzy combination.

As we run across two lanes of traffic, hop over the divider, and dash across two more. Alice: “This is like a video game, only you’re playing with your life.”

Earlier this week, I ate a delicious lunch of baguette, nutella, and orangina while sitting on the beach. The market where we bought the food has a deli where you pick your own freshly baked baguette from a rack and then pass it behind the counter to the woman making your sandwich. They also sell jam in fantastic flavors like bissap (hibiscus) and something that translates to ‘bread of monkeys’. I think it’s the fruit of the baobab tree.

This one’s for Marian. Yes, the number ‘ten’ in Wolof is indeed ‘fukk’.

My host mother and I had a conversation the other day about how Americans are indiscreet. I agreed. But thinking about how my host mother walks around the house every morning wearing only a sheet, and about how she changes with her door open, so that I’ve already seen her topless, I think Americans and Senegalese just have differing definitions of ‘indiscreet’.

I was at My Shop with some friends yesterday evening, sitting at the plastic tables while everyone around us ate pizza and fast food chicken. My friends bought wine and drank from the bottle. I just had ice cream. I felt ridiculously adult nonetheless.

As an addendum to that last anecdote: last night I left Alice’s house at 2:30 am. (After My Shop, we went to her house. We ended up on her roof, watching the stars and taxis and listening to the prayers rising from the mosque across the street.) When I finally decided to go, I made her wait with me on the sidewalk until a taxi pulled up, and when she went to go back inside, the door had locked behind her. No one in her family was up to let her in, so she had to come back to my place and crash on the couch is my room. I’ve never before felt like such a cosmopolitan twenty-something. Oh, and did I mention that this all took place in Senegal?