Beneath a Baobab: Stories from Sénégal

And with great pleasure, I present to you: Mbam

I’ll begin with a brief introduction to the village of Mbam. It is located in the region of Fatick, the rural community of Djilor, and in the islands of the Sine-Saloum River Delta. It is 3km behind the town of Foundiougne. It is a small Serere (an ethnic group in Senegal) village, well it’s big relative to others in the area, but by our standards of cities, this one is tiny. No one knows exactly how many people live there, as Senegal has not had the resources to complete a census in over 20 years. I heard estimations between 3000 and 5000. It’s important to remember though that each house compound has, I’d say on average, 8-10 people. The village has a for-the-most-part regular grid layout. The roads are all of sand, and many paths have been cut through the fields surrounding Mbam to connect it with the other villages in the area. The vast majority of people do not have cars. In fact, my siblings would run and jump up to look over the fence every time they heard a vehicle driving past.

(And on that note, I remember one time I was sitting outside with several of my siblings. The boys were roasting peanuts and my sister and I were working on pounding peanuts into peanut butter with a huge mortar and pestle. Suddenly everyone stopped what they were doing and looked up to the sky. I didn’t know what was happening. I asked and they all responded “Il y a un avion.” [There’s a plane.] Mbam does not seem to fall below any flight paths, so planes are rare events. This is huge contrast from my experience in Dakar. My house is near the airport and every plane landing in Dakar seems to fly right overhead, so close that I can see the paint details and read the serial numbers. So imagine my surprise when everyone stopped their activities to observe this one plane. But that is the essence of village life.)

So I was talking about transportation, horse- or donkey-drawn carts are the most common forms of transportation, besides, of course, the conventional walking approach to getting from place to place. It was by horse-drawn cart that I traveled to the weekly market on Tuesdays in the town 3km over, to other villages as a part of my internship, or for baptisms and funerals with my mother, or just to go to the beach to clean the horse and trade water for fish from the fishermen. (Don’t worry, I’ll address all these topics later.) I became adept at hopping onto the cart and developed the instinct of where to position myself in order to best balance the cart for the horse.

As for the amenities: there was electricity in Mbam, though definitely not every house had it. There was also running water, but again this was not found in every compound. And in those in which you could find running water, we’re talking about a single spigot in the yard from which you fill up buckets for bathing and cleaning. All drinking and cooking water is fetched from a well, and you can pay to fill water canisters at community faucets.

posted by Hannah Gelder @ 12:33 PM