One long post (sorry!) or a collection of shorter posts for your reading convenience

Friday 11/13: Seawater, milk and millet flour. This is the protective magic potion which my work partner gave me yesterday. He unceremoniously poured it into a used Kirene water bottle and advised me to sprinkle it in front of my door (it’s not Passover yet, is it?) and then bathe with the rest of the potion. According to local tradition, this will ensure that I’m in the good graces of the appropriate neighborhood génie, and protected from unmentioned evils. At some point, I will need to witness a ceremony where a guardian will sprinkle that same mixture on the spirit’s holy tree and I, having been doused in more of the mixture, will be submerged in the river. Then (chick-chack) I and my future work are all protected against ill. This is simply an expression of the animism which pervades this community and Seereer tradition.

Saturday 11/14: The potion’s protective powers did not cover today, apparently, as I’ve just witnessed my first pig slaughter. (So much for coming to a Muslim country.) This was somewhat more traumatizing than last week’s killing of a chicken because the pig made a shitton more noise in the moments leading up to its death. And this time Death came in the form of a half-drunk Rasta who I thought would burst into tears from shame as soon as the beast stopped kicking. As I write this, he – Death – has regained his composure if not his sobriety and is butchering up the animal in the twilight. I won’t be dining on his handiwork; while my family picnics on pig tomorrow, I’ll be having lunch with my counterpart and a visiting American study abroad kid. [Africa lesson #843752: Pig that has been left overnight is absolutely one of the worst smells in the world, especially first thing in the morning.]

Week in review: Deb, an American exchange student in Dakar, spent a few days this week at my counterpart’s campement for the “rural visit” part of her semester. A campement isn’t the most rustic rural site, but Deb took advantage of the situation to learn a little more about Seereer culture and cooking all the same. For my part, I took advantage of some much needed good ole American company, even though it came in the form of a complete stranger.

With the help of some experts – Hadi and Fambaye – we learned how to make cere, laxh and mbaum sauce. Cere (a.k.a. sacc, a.k.a. millet couscous) is a Seereer staple. Until recently, it was the main starch for two, if not three, of the day’s meals. Millet is immensely more nutritional than its imported replacement rice and far more filling, too. However, preparing cere requires a lengthy process of hulling and pounding and mixing and sieving and mixing and steaming and sieving and steaming…to get to its healthful form. And it has the unfortunate characteristics of tasting like nothing much at all, and of having the same texture as soggy sand.

Laxh is millet in its least healthful form. It’s much easier to make than cere because you can buy the necessary larger-size morsels at the boutique. From there you boil it, add some salt and citrus juice, and top with sweetened yogurt – either store-bought or made from curdled cow’s milk and mixed with baobab fruit (a.k.a. monkey bread). Laxh has the texture of a thick porridge and tastes like cake frosting. Amazing. For obvious reasons, this “dessert for dinner” meal is rarely eaten more than once a week. (We haven’t had it at all in my new ML~ family.) Equally obvious is that the homemade yogurt is better than the store-bought version.

Mbaum sauce. The only way to think about this dish is to imagine yourself as a poorish college student trying to put together a meal with whatever you can find in your barren kitchen. Only now imagine yourself as a genuinely poor person scrounging together anything remotely nutritious in the immediate environment to get you through the exhausting work that is living without farm machinery or running water or electricity. Mbaum is leaves of the nebbedie tree, desiccated mussels/oysters, desiccated fish (both cooked and raw), black-eyed-peas, and crush peanuts, all of which are easily available in Senegal. Eat over the previously mentioned millet, and you have one hell of a healthy meal. I didn’t stick around to try this dish, but Deb didn’t exactly give it rave reviews.

Aside from the cooking lessons and good food, having Deb around just to talk to in English (and French and broken Wolof) temporarily did wonders for my mental state. I might not ever have the enthusiasm she has for living in Africa, but her visit reminded me of some of the reasons I’m here in the first place. And even though my “work” (or lack of) might be frustrating/depressing/demoralizing/boring/unfulfilling, some of the random day-to-day experiences [Seereer women breaking into song for me or finding a half-digested little fish in the belly of a bigger fish I was gutting for dinner] start to make up for it. I guess I just need an occasional reminder of home to put that into relief.