I've gotten good at SST (Senegalese Standard Time)

IST is over and I’ve been back at site for almost a week. I’m once again relieved to be “home,” breathing the clean air (pollution-free, but a little dusty), sleeping in my own bed. There is still some residual motivation and optimism from my training. The sense of overwhelming isolation and simple goddamn heat just knock a lot out of me, but there is work to do!

Anyway, some funny things from the last few days:

I. No matter how right you are, if you are a young, toubab (white) girl, you are always wrong. To get back to site last week, I rented a car with a couple of other volunteers. It’s a much more expensive alternative to public transport; but with a month’s worth of luggage, it was an attractive solution to getting home.

The only problem was that the car’s owner refused to take the route I laid out, swearing the paved road was a safer bet than the red bush-road for the last leg of the trip. Except that I actually live here now and I know that the paved road is a wreck, utterly beat up and potholed. What should be a 25-minute ride takes an hour and a half because the cars are forced to slow down and navigate the trenches. The bush-road, on the other hand, is in fine condition this side of the rainy season.

But having three counts against me (my age, gender and skin color), I couldn’t possibly be right. We took the paved road. The driver, unlike his boss, had never even heard of my port town; would you believe he was asking me, “Are we there yet?” every half hour?! The trip to N~ ultimately took an excruciating 3 hours. And topping off the day’s adventures in transport, I then had to wait 2 hours for the next pirogue. When I bitch about being isolated in spite of being this close to Dakar, you can understand what I mean.

II. On Saturday I went to buy some milk powder and laundry soap.

En route I

a) scared a donkey (hysterical), and

b) saw a charette with a sign reading “Hitler – Mar Salou – 1933-45” (uncomfortable and weird).

Ah, Senegal. You never cease to confuse the hell out of me.

III. File this under the List of Things You Probably Didn’t Want to Know About Your Food Before Eating It:

Ndambe is a bean dish made with onions and spicy red sauce. Wander around any village or neighborhood any morning of the week and you’ll eventually find at least one woman selling homemade ndambe out of a large, shallow bowl. If you’re lucky, you’ll get your ndambe on tapalapa (village bread, as opposed to industrially produced crap) and the vendor might add in kane (hot sauce) or homemade mayonnaise or hardboiled egg. Some families eat ndambe as an evening meal, over rice or millet couscous, often with bread to ensure that you have an overdose of carbohydrates equal to the unusual quantity of protein in the dish. Ndambe is one of the few tricks of Senegalese cuisine worth bringing home. (We’ve already discussed introducing bean sandwiches to the American breakfast diet; it’s our post-service business plan.)

As ubiquitous as bean sandwich ladies are, my family in ML~ doesn’t eat ndambe –or beans in any form – all that often. So when I saw a plate of beans (black-eyed peas, I think) out in the sun the other day, I got excited. Hoping to subtly relay my enthusiasm through overeager curiosity, I asked E~ why she’d put the beans out in the sun, if that was an integral part of the cooking process.

Well, she replied, she’d been storing those beans just a little too long and des petites bêtes (read: insects) had gone and eaten holes into every last been. Placing the metal plate out in the hot sun forced the bugs to crawl out of the beans and die. A quick look confirmed the fact: tiny black bugs were withering next to the precious black-eyed peas. Seeing my face turn what I can only assume was a disconcerting shade of green, she added, “All good beans have bugs. That’s how you know they’re good.”

…

That night we ate ndambe with shrimp, using tapalapa in lieu of utensils. It was one of the best meals I’ve had in 7 months, petites bêtes notwithstanding.

III. b)

And here is how wext (dried sea urchin, I think?) is prepared:

Dried, chopped and salted to keep away the flies, on a cinder-block in the middle of the compound.