Beneath a Baobab: Stories from Sénégal

As for my house and family

I lived with a large family. Bineta was my mother. She is an oddity in Senegal, a woman in her 40s, unmarried and without children. However, she has a huge heart and the financial means by which she can afford to take people in. There were five students that lived permanently at her house and one old man. The boys were: Badara (age 19), Joseph (16) and Jean (14). I think those are their ages, although they all say they’re younger b/c in Senegal, you can easily change your birth certificate in order to appear younger so you can repeat a grade in the school system if you failed to pass the promotion exams. (It’s complicated, I wish I could explain this better.) Jo and Jean are brothers. There were two girls: Marie Noel (19) and Fatou (18). Jo and Jean are brothers, and they, in addition to Badara and Marie Noel, are all from the next village over—Gague Mody. Then depending on the night of the week and if there were evening courses, Badara’s brother, Cheikh, and another girl Ami, would stay at our house. In addition, there were two boys Mbanigck and Pape, who lived in a nearby compound, but took almost all their meals with us and spend a considerable amount of time at our house.

Bineta’s house was a social center, people were always hanging out there. I LOVED it! Two other girls often at our house were Rama (20) from next door, and Sadio (10). Then there was also Fape Mag (Serere for Grandpa). Bineta took him in. He apparently has some mental problems, but I was never aware of them. He was just the sweetest, older man ever, who could sit and do nothing for hours on end.

The house compounds varied throughout the village. Our house was big by Mbam standards. We even had a cement structure, in addition to the sand-brick, thatch roof huts found in all compounds. The compound was encompassed by a large fence, as they all are, one side made of brick, the rest out of dried bean stalks tied together. The house had 5 bedrooms, a living room, a tiny kitchen with no light bulb, and an area referred to as the terrace. We never used the living room, except to watch t.v. at night and to entertain guests. Most of the living was done in the terrace area or outside in the yard. The kitchen is nothing like we’re used to. It’s essentially a storage area with all the spices, pots and large bowls, utensils, and gas canisters. The gas is brought outside or to the terrace and that is where all food preparation occurs.

All food is prepared fresh and by hand every day, every meal. You cannot buy minced garlic or prechopped onions. And, as it turns out, every Senegalese dish calls for minced garlic and chopped onions. They don’t have a stove and oven set like I’m used to in the States. Instead they have one canister of gas with a single burner, so you prepare one part of the meal at a time. Meal preparation takes a good several hours. Not to mention you are preparing for at least 8 people every time. (The night I cooked, I made scrambled eggs and potatoes. 3/4 liter oil, 29 eggs (1 bounced off the horse-cart), 4 kilos of potatoes, 2 kilos of onions, some salt, garlic, 4 green peppers and 2.5 hours later, I fed 13 people for dinner around two very large bowls. They loved it. It was good to have a taste of home too, but it was exhausting to prepare on that scale. I should also mention this entire meal, plus soda, and cookies, cost me US $21.20. 30 eggs cost me US $5, and that is considered very expensive.) So that was the house itself.

The rest of the compound consisted of 3 thatch-roof huts. One is the outdoor kitchen, but also doubles as a storage chamber for the horse feed (the peanut plant itself). The brothers in my family, slept in another hut, and the other hut was used for storage, but later converted into a bedroom for our grandfather.

And I suppose you want to know about toilets too. With the one spigot outside, flush toilets and showerheads were not an option. There was a chair (as they call the toilet bowls we know) that you could access from inside the house, but it was hard to flush (manually) and often smelled terrible. I preferred the Turkish toilet, which was part of the main house structure, but accessed from the outside. I also took my bucket showers in this stall. There was also an outdoor shower area, privacy created by the bean-stalk fence, and an outdoor traditional douce (a cement hole in the ground—don’t ask me what happened to anything deposited in the hole b/c I have no idea.) I know the Turkish toilet and toilet chair were connected to a septic tank, emptied periodically by a big truck. All trash was dumped in a pile, burned from time to time, behind a fence in our yard. (Not much trash was created though b/c this is not a culture like our own in which everything is individually packaged. All food scraps were given to the goats or other animals.)

I neglected to mention the other key members of our family. There was Malabar/Mbagnick the horse (he had 2 names), Hannah (the sheep they named after me) and her mother, Nyiadie the cat and her 3 kittens, a goat, 1 rooster, 3 hens, and 9 chicklets, And then there were many other animals that wandered through the yard throughout the day. I was in heaven! This was my dream-come-true village life.

posted by Hannah Gelder @ 12:30 PM