Village life

Imagine yourself in a rural Senegalese village. It’s 3 p.m., the hottest part of the day, and the family is hanging out in the shade, both adults and kids relaxing in a sweaty, post-lunch haze. The women and girls are busily cracking peanuts (all day, every day) and, being a girl yourself, you’re helping out. You’ve become rather good at it, actually, which is probably not a cause for celebration, but it helps pass the time. The man of the house is lounging in one of the only plastic chairs, fanning himself. He takes a handful of peanuts, and for a second you think he might- just maybe – for the first time ever – help out, but instead he pops them into his mouth. Of course. One of his sons is busy making tea, which in Senegal is superstrong, supersweet, and served in shot glasses three times a day. The younger children are nursing or playing on the ground with whatever comes to hand – peanut shells, a piece of string. Three horses stroll past single-file on their way to the well. Goats and sheep hang around nonchalantly, looking for their chance to steal in and snatch a couple peanuts. A chicken, with a blue piece of fabric tied around a wing denoting ownership, pecks at ants around your feet. Everything is peaceful.

Suddenly, a kid hits a smaller companion and steals her piece of torn-up paper. An older sister punches the perpetrator. A mother swipes at all three of them with a stick.  The baby on her back screams. The three kids wail. A quartet of wild-eyed donkeys stampede past, kicking at each other and braying, while other adults snatch children from their path, yelling. The tranquil afternoon has dissolved into typical village chaos. You retreat back to your room to nurse your burgeoning headache and raw fingertips (peanut cracking ain’t easy!) and open a book, trying to ignore the flies buzzing around your head and the screeches still echoing around the compound.

So, village life. How to describe it? Village-y, say some of my peers, and that’s about as accurate as you can get. It’s slow. It’s strange that even though most people are continuously working (peanut cracking, cooking, working in the fields) the pace of life just seems… slooooow. Of course, I don’t do much of the work myself, which contributes. I do a lot of sitting around, listening to conversations and trying to respond if any Jaxanke is directed at me. I read, a lot. Thanks, Dad, for building up my library – a sanity saver. I pull my own water. One bucket per day, used for filtering, showering, brushing my teeth, etc. I use unfiltered water for everything except straight drinking – figure that if I’m going to get a parasite from brushing my teeth with well water, I’ll just learn my lesson that way. I do my laundry out by the well, with the rest of the women, while they laugh and ask me over and over again “Kuuro ke? I kusanta!? I kusanta?!” Laundry? You can do it?!  “Mkusanta!” I tell them repeatedly, shooing away the cow trying to drink from my laundry basin. I go to bed early, usually by 9 or 9:30 every night. This is for a couple reasons – there’s not much to do after dinner, so after a bit of sitting around in the dark I excuse myself. Also, reading or doing anything else with my flashlight just attracts bugs of all kinds. Therefore, it seems like the most reasonable and safe decision is to go straight to bed. I sleep outside every night because of the heat – when it rains I have a fancy shmancy shade structure with plastic to keep the rain off my cement bed, which I can hook my mosquito net to. I realize that rain AND wind together will be a problem; I’ll deal with that when I come to it. Maybe I’ll retreat inside. I don’t like the idea of sleeping inside, though. I’ve only done it once or twice, and besides the heat, there’s the constant scurrying and scratching that tells you there are unwelcome creatures sharing your hut/bed. Not very conducive to a peaceful sleep. But then, neither are the nighttime village sounds, inside or out. One night, I woke from a Jurassic Park-themed nightmare, half-convinced that the donkeys’ wheezes were really velociraptors on the hunt, and I’m pretty sure my mosquito net was not made for dinosaur repelling.

Ok, honestly, village life at this point, still the settling-in period, is pretty boring. Sometimes the days stretch on impossibly. But IST starts in a couple days, and afterwards I hope to begin some projects, and at the very least give myself a small task every day. I know that once I start feeling productive, and less like a participant in some strange social experiment, I’ll be happier. Thank you to everyone for your support so far!

Until next time!