Every day at 6am I can hear Muslim religious chants, except on Sundays my host mom said the chants are for Christians. It was also kind of cool because every Sunday she watches a TV channel where they show the services of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism and every Sunday morning she watches and follows with a mini holy book for all 4 religions. They have a very inclusive view of religion here which I think is really cool. I also found out today that my host mom designed their entire house. The house is really big, larger than mine, and it is very nicely designed.

Host Family

My host family here is great. My host mom is 70 and she is a widow. She has 10 sons and 5 daughters, which apparently is a medium sized family here. Some of them live in the states and Canada, and one of them went to school in Pittsburg (shout out to Max if you’re reading this). They are all my age or older. I think about 4 or 5 of the sons live in the house now, and 5 or 6 of the daughters. Two of them have 3 kids each, the youngest of which is 2 and the oldest is probably 9 or 10. The kids are easy to get along with. I gave them a deck of cards and they spent hours playing with them, though I had trouble teaching them go fish. For the oldest one everything is “too” something. My dogs are too cute, my clothes are too pretty, and even my “smartphone” is too beautiful. They also have an obsession with my floss and my electric toothbrush.

My older siblings were hard to get to know at first, but now I’m interacting with them pretty well. I walked with one of my sisters, Yacine, to the beach the other day and was pretty pleased with my French; I managed to hold a conversation for about 20 minutes straight. Both of us share an interest in motorcycles but parents who think they are too dangerous.

My other siblings are really nice too. One of them helped me with my Wolof homework (the native Senegalese language that I am learning). We have a deal that I will teach him English if he teaches me Wolof. Wolof is not too difficult grammatically but the pronunciation is really hard. Also instead of conjugating verbs they conjugate pronouns, which will take some getting used to. Right now we’ve only learned “survival Wolof” which teaches us how to hold basic conversations with people, how to bargain with taxi drivers, and how to say things like “I’m tired” or “I’m hungry” I haven’t had to use it much because almost everyone I’ve talked to so far speaks French, but I’m sure it will come in handy.

One of my siblings will ask me if I’m cold every time I see her. For some reason if I am not wearing socks she is especially concerned; even if I’m wearing a tank top she’ll point to my feet and ask if I’m cold. My host mom is also quite concerned with my body temperature. She always says things like “I closed your windows because it’s very cold outside” or “you have a fan but you don’t need that in the winter” even though temperature averages about 70 degrees.  

Eating

WED 22^nd We had our “cross cultural orientation” where we practiced eating. This may seem strange but it was completely necessary. Here are some rules that I found particularly helpful to know before eating with my family:

1. Once you wash your hands before eating you cannot touch anything else with them.
2. You can only use your right hand to eat (someone from a trip last semester said they used their left hand and their host mom smacked it).
3. You eat with your hands, but you cannot let your fingers touch your mouth when you take a bite (this would be the equivalent of double dipping). This is easy for vegetables, but for rice you have to squish the rice in your hand until it sticks together in a little ball then drop it into your mouth. It’s harder than you’d think.
4. Everyone eats from the same big bowl. Your territory is the little pie-shaped section right in front of you. You CANNOT cross into someone else’s territory.
5. It is rude to start eating the “goodies” – fish and vegetables – at the center before spending some time eating the rice first. The goodies are in whole pieces, so you rip a chunk off when you want to eat something, which is hard to do with one hand sometimes.
6. Don’t smell food before putting it in your mouth or it seems like you expected the food to be rotten.
7. Don’t compliment the food after your first bite or it seems like you expected it to be bad, wait until the end to compliment.
8. If the rice is too hot for your hand, don’t pull it back in pain. If you need to let someone know that you want to wait until the food is cooler before eating it, you can say “the cook must be jealous.” This is because when the wife is mad at her husband, she will purposefully serve the food when it is too hot to signal that she wants to talk to him.
9. Don’t start taking another handful of rice until you have swallowed what you are chewing, or it seems like you are trying to eat quicker so you can get more than anyone else.
10. As a guest when you say you are full the first time, they will insist that you keep eating. So you must strategize and say you are full before you actually are, then keep eating, then compliment the chef.
11. When you are completely finished eating you lick all the rice off your hand and wash your hands. You do not need to wait until everyone else is done eating before you get up, you can just leave. 

Given how strict these rules seemed, I was really nervous to eat with my family. It ended up not being a problem though, only a few of these rules were actually followed. I guess that would be like telling a foreigner that in the States we always put the fork on the left and the knife and spoon on the right, then going to my house for dinner (we definitely don’t do this). We did all eat from the same bowl, with spoons though not our hands. And sticking to your pie segment seemed to be the standard method. Also the rule about them telling you to keep eating was an understatement. I told them I was full and they insisted I keep eating, as planned. But then I said I was full again and they kept insisting I eat more as they put food in front of me. And when I complemented the food they we were like “oh I’m glad you like it, eat more.” So now I need a new plan. 

Bienvenue

Hello everyone! I have decided to start this blog as a way of sharing my semester abroad in Senegal with everyone. More posts will come soon. Enjoy reading!