At the beginning of November I set out to spend a week with a Peace Corps Volunteer living 10 hours from Dakar in rural Senegal. I hopped on a seven-seat sedan, a rickety metal bus, a small wooden boat and finally a horse drawn cart that pulled me the last 3 km down a sandy track and left me in the village of Ndjomdi. Looking up as we arrived I saw cement huts with thatched millet roofs, chickens pecking at the ground, small goats wandering between the compounds and a crowd of children come to see the visitor. As my hostess lived with the village chief, I was taken to his compound of roughly 50 relatives where I installed myself for the week.
With a collection of huts and larger cement buildings framing a flat, sandy courtyard the family naturally gravitated towards this center, which is how I found myself sitting on a woven plastic mat after night had fallen, cracking peanuts with my host sisters. Or should I say attempting to. I was making a valiant effort to copy the women’s effective technique for breaking the shell and dislodging the nut in one, swift movement but despite my best efforts my pile of peanuts seemed to remain stagnant while theirs grew exponentially next to mine. This disparity in our progress did not prevent my host sisters from suggesting that I stop to rest every few minutes or so because they didn’t wish to tire their guest out with the work.
To pull the conversation away from my obvious inability I tried to engage my sisters in another topic, only to find myself severely constrained in my choices by my limited knowledge of Wolof and the fact that the local language was Sereer. One word that did translate between the two African tongues was “fecc,” meaning “dance” and either my delight in our successful communication was mistaken for enthusiasm for this particular pastime, or the family was simply eager for a little fun at my expense because I suddenly found myself pulled to my feet and in a circle of women laughing, clapping and clamoring for me to “fecc! fecc! fecc!” Let me say, for the record, that I cannot dance in any culture, let alone Senegalese, but I gave it my best shot and after a while was replaced by women who actually knew what they were doing. This was certainly not Dakar.
Despite this energetic beginning to the week, the next several days passed rather slowly in a haze of sweltering November heat. I followed my host to the garden to pull well water and prepare the dirt beds to receive seedlings, walked 45 minutes down a dusty path to the town of Djilor for sandwiches of village bread and beans and made the rounds among the village of Ndjomdi itself, visiting several recent mothers and distributing small, congratulatory gifts. Towards the end of my stay the two of us took a trip to the Saloum River for a swim as the afternoon was drawing to a close. Enjoying a break from the constant heat we were startled when someone called out from the bank; a man from the neighboring village of Pêche was offering us watermelon.
Never one to turn down fresh fruit, especially given its rare nature in Senegal we clambered out and headed toward the hotel from which he had come. I use the word “hotel” loosely, for while that is ostensibly the long term plan for the walled-off area we entered, as it stands today only one small building has been erected behind the low wall, amid a vast quantity of watermelon vines and dust. There were several more men seated around the building who, as they explained it, were planning on starting work next week and in the meantime were to guard the fruit from possible thieves. No matter, as friends we were entitled to share the produce with them, which is why one man grabbed his machete and was soon presenting us each with half a watermelon. And so I sat for a while amid watermelon seeds and dusty tools while the men made tea over a tiny green pot and their machetes lay untouched next to the rinds from similar meals with other friends, watching as the sun sank lower over the Sine-Saloum Delta and thinking that a few months ago I never would have pictured this.
Except for a few such moments that startled me out of my relative calm, my week-long rural visit progressed at a slow and leisurely pace. Life in the village of Ndjomdi may be without traditional comforts – think no running water, heat or electricity – but it is comfortable. Still that week has given me a new appreciation for my modern lifestyle and I will admit that after eating millet twice a day it was with delight that I sat down to rice with my host family upon returning to Dakar. Writing this now under the glow of my ceiling light, with the tailor’s shop humming just inside my front door in a desperate attempt to keep up with the orders for the looming holiday of Tabaski, I can feel that we have turned a corner and are beginning the descent down the final stretch of my study abroad experience. For the first time I feel hesitation at the prospect of leaving in what feels like a few short weeks and I am just beginning to recognize that I will have a lot in this country to miss once I have returned home.
