Fatick

Finally I left Dakar after three months with the Georges (Djiodg) family to start six weeks of an internship and life anew in the small town of Fatick, capital of the Fatick region of Senegal. The 6:30 in the morning Au Revior to my host mother, Yaay Ndèye, and Bassirou who stood on the front porch of our Mermoz villa as I packed my bags into the rusty yellow taxi was too short for all that my Senegalese family has done for me. Even if I was someone who was not born into a state of complete misery and unpleasantness anytime I have to wake up before 2pm a morning person, I wouldn’t have known how in Wolof, French, or English to thank my tiny, smiley mother for all the times she has come up the stairs, that are sometimes sprinkled with tiny sheep marbles when Seynabou, our domestique, has yet to sweep, to knock on my door when I ignore the Rooster setting of my alarm clock to wake me up for class (almost every day). Bassirou was smiling in his unattached way with his sleepy morning eyes. He looked fresher than the breezy Monday morning in his cream bazin pants and white t-shirt with a brown collar that anyone who’s ever accidently used bleach to do their color laundry could tell used to be navy blue. As he pretended not to strain his little African torso to lift my heaviest bag into the trunk, I was glad that I got to say goodbye to him only an hour or two before, but more on that later.

The bus dropped me off second of our group of twenty being dispersed around the West African countryside and Waly and Korka accompanied me from the sandy street outside of the house into the dusty courtyard and sat on my bed to discuss in Wolof with my host brother Mor Guèye (haaaah) that even in the mid-afternoon they were comfortable without the area fan because it’s lot cooler in Fatick than in Dakar; Alhamdililah. I slipped my shoes off and on again before entering and after leaving each room as Mor gave me a tour around the three different sections of the house, built compound-style around the courtyard, one for each of the older, married women and their children [Coro Bass- Fama, Mami*, Maditka**, Baymar**, Pape Demba****; Astou - Mamar, Awa, Salal**, Alba**, Astou; Awa- Maa, her son Mor, his wife Jara and their babies Jara, Cheikh; and the other children who aren’t directly related to the families but students living for the time- Abda**, his brother Elija, Mamadou, Awa; also about three domestiques and neighbors who are around often.] (*stars are to indicate their level of cuteness). Each of the three sections has a comfortable salon with satellite TV, plenty of area fans, laminated pictures of the wives wearing a lot more makeup than usual and various marabouts on the walls, glittery fake flowers on the wooden tabletops, and lounging children warming the armrests of the floral-patterned sofas or the area in front of the TV for anyone who shoves them side with their foot to walk by.

At this moment, I write this entry in the dark on a piece of scratch paper in my own, relatively large bedroom on my comfortable queen-sized wooden bed. Unlike in Dakar, the nighttime brings peaceful, dare I say cold breezes that cause my blue embroidered curtain to breath in the space between by bed and the rusty turquoise window. The walls are tall and concrete and have various scrapes and markings where the children scribbled or scratched over the yellowing paint. There are spider webs/ colonies from within reaching distance in the corners of the walls where you might accidently run your hand through a cluster ( :( ) to the ceiling where their inhabitants’ frightening size and number is probably what has been keeping that gigantic cockroach from leaving the wooden splintery beam above my bed. I can hear the scratching of bats on the thin tin roof and I wonder what it sounds like in here when it rains; I’d like to find out.

Aside from when I’m not lounging on my foam mattress and orange floral sheet on my bed behind the curtain in the doorframe of my room, I have found that there’s not a whole lot to do in Fatick. I’ve started work at Mutelle d’Epargne et de Credit de Fatick “Le Sine”, a microfinance organization for women run by the plump, frog-faced Madame Seynabou Sow, who smells like lemons and what you don’t smell like after you take a shower. Mme Sow is also Sydney’s host mother, meaning I get to see her manhandle giant scoops of rice and sauce in her bra when I visit Sydney at lunchtime. Because last week was my first week, after I would arrive in the empty, echoing room of the Case Foyer building and share a second breakfast of bread and sweet instant coffee as well as stories of fishing with Japanese traders off the coast of Dakar with the older, camouflage jumpsuit-wearing, rickety motobike riding, deep raspy voice-having, brown teeth-smiling security guard named Pape Diop, I spent my time only learning. I read microfinancial law (shout out to Loi N°2008-47 ya heard), familiarized myself with documents and looked up technical vocabulary in my French-English dictionary, and sat in on meetings between wise Mme Sow and various individual women or leaders of women’s organizations who came in to demand credit to finance their small-scale projects.

When I descend from the back of the motobikes I whistle (or rather tsss tsss tsss!) for to go home for lunch, finish my salutations with anyone lining the sandy street the rest of the way to my house, I eat from one of the three large bowls for the women, make ataya under the full leafy tree in the courtyard, or watch/act as the token white person that all the kids stare at as Mor gives supplementary lessons to his young impatient students in the tiny, cramped room/designated classroom off of the courtyard of the house. Some hooligan wrote in pencil on a wall:
« La salle de classe de Mor
est chaud comme un four. »
Or, Mor’s classroom is hot like an oven, but it rhymes and is funny in French.
Although I believe one of the women and two of the children can be claimed by Mor, he has expressed interest in having me as his American wife. To his invitations, I usually just laugh and tell him he’s just being greedy, but the other day, as he showed me the “beach” or shallow water enclave on the side of the only highway in Senegal where salt is harvested and with alleged access to the ocean, I watched him limp in his brown rubber flip-flops and torn blue jeans (he has a disease where one of his legs looks as though it has no muscle and his sandal, even when taken off, is curled in a swirl to fit the form of his foot) and wondered what it would be like to be his wife. I imagine I would buy some expensive bazin and it would be a big ordeal to find the right tailor to make my dress, there would be a lot of medium-quality gold jewelry involved, perhaps a goat or two, and he would have to give me a large sum of money. However, my thoughts were interrupted when I noticed I was veering towards a lump of dead, decaying sheep on the beach. Some of its teeth and bones were scattered a couple of feet in each direction and tufts of coarse white hair were blowing across the sand. Besides, I’m already taken.