Wow, I have failed miserably at this whole blogging deal over Thanksgiving, as normally I would be much better about getting a good entry or two up as soon as I got to Kaolack. But here you go.
I successfully made it through 5 weeks of sitting at site, not doing anything particularly productive with my life, not quite knowing the language or people who live there, and essentially wondering what I got myself into. I made it through Tabaski and endless hours of sitting, peeling and cutting onions to cook the Tabaski meal, and watching them kill sheep. Little background information- Tabaski is the Islamic holiday that celebrates the story of Abraham and his willingness to kill his own son to prove his faithfulness to God. Most of you know the story or some variation thereof: at the last minute, God informs him that he should sacrifice a ram instead. In order to celebrate this, Muslims decided that they should do the same, so everyone kills sheep throughout the country and has large, meat-eating celebrations. However, the process of killing and cooking the sheep is not exactly the clean, well-run operation that you would imagine in the states. People dig a hole in the ground to drain the blood, everyone brings their sheep or goat over to the communal killing location, and they ceremonially saw off the sheeps’ heads with machetes. There are a few pictures of the killing in the Tabaski album if you’re curious to see the gore. I’ve got a video too if anybody is really sick in the head.
The problem with this whole Tabaski process is that it is almost entirely based around the cooking process, and in Senegal, cooking is exclusively the women’s job. This gets really annoying when you consider that my sister Umi went home to her family in Foungioune for Tabaski, my mom Arame got very sick, and I have a small enough family that much of the cooking responsibility fell to me. After spending hours peeling onions and cutting up chunks of meat, we had to wait until 3 in the afternoon to be able to serve the men food. Another hour later, finally, women were able to sit down and actually eat the food they had been cooking all morning. But before they could do so, they decided that the whole community must eat exactly the same meal, so they put all the cooked food from all of the bowls from all of the families into one large bowl, mixed it, then redistributed it back into the bowls brought by all the women. It was a rather odd process. Everyone then dressed up, and many of the younger people went out dancing each night. I did my best to make an appearance, but I have decided that Senegalese dancing is probably better watched than done, especially if I am going to be here for two years.
By the end of the five weeks, I was definitely ready to get out of site. After days of sitting in another culture, isolated from friends and family and not having much to do, I was beginning to lose my patience. A visit to Cassie’s site did the trick. I traveled down to her site just north of Karang to see her lovely agroforestry projects and get inspiration for my own in the future. We wondered around all morning, chatted, saw some lovely live fencing, and decided that it made no sense for us to sit around and do nothing all night when we had a free afternoon to travel into Kaolack, so we came into the house for the night and had a chance to hang out with friends a bit before the madness of Thanksgiving occurred.
Thanksgiving itself was lovely. I was responsible for making pies, because as those of you who know me probably know, I am much more of a baker than a cook. I really miss baking in the states- our ovens have pilot lights, temperature gauges, and are big enough to put more than two tiny pies in them on its single rack at once. However, it was still a good time hanging out in the kitchen, listening to music and baking with friends. After two full days of cooking and baking and 5 mil (about 10 bucks) a person, we put together a true Thanksgiving feast of turkey, green bean casserole, deviled eggs, macaroni and cheese, sweet potato casserole, a few other vegetable dishes, corn bread (we actually had to pound the corn meal from scratch), sangria with orange slices actually floating in it, and pumpkin, squash and apple pies. I am pretty sure I have never been more full in my entire life. Definitely a success. And what do you imagine happens when you have 41 just out of college kids in a house after a good meal hanging out in a house together? You’re probably wrong. We sat around, complained about how full we all were, watched a movie, and went to bed. Thanksgiving, no matter where in the world you are, is not a giant party. That tryptophan gets you every time.
I bought an AC/DC converter for my family so I will be able to charge my computer at site! That means I will have internet access as soon as that gets hooked up and I can secure a wireless key, so I look forward to skyping and emailing all of you on a more regular basis very soon. Also, I found a volunteer who is leaving soon and is actually planning on GIVNG me his guitar, so I will be saner at site in the future, inshallah. At any rate, it seems that the worst of the at-site insanity is over, but I have a long way to go, so we’ll see how this journey plays out. In the meantime, I will be traveling into Thies for our all-volunteer conference on Thursday, so I will soon again have internet and bring you the next episode of these ramblings.
Until next time,
~E
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