So this is it. I leave my house in 9.5 hours to head to the Leopold Sedar Senghor airport…I’ll be in Michigan Monday morning around 10 a.m. inshala.
Last night, my yaay (mother) started sing-songing a phrase to my baby nephew Pape, this is how he learns new words. “Dinaa naam lo Money! Money dinaa naam lo!” –I’ll miss you, Molly! Molly, I’m going to miss you!
Quickly, everyone started chanting along and soon everyone in the floor level was melodically enticing me to tears.
It was so endearing and really indicative of my time in this house: loud, hilarious, cheerful, unpredictable, musical, embracing, kind and hard to react to.
Here’s a few of the items I wrote down today to think back on, lest I ever start to forget this place:
-how everyone in the house is always taking everyone else’s shoes to walk around in, I never find my own
-How our one maid, Daynaba, will dance in front of me when no one else is around. She’s started to talk to me in Wolof, though she knows I understand only parts.Today when I started packing she came and asked if I would ever come back, and why wouldn’t I just stay another day?
-How at any given moment one of my sisters will jump out of their seat and start dancing wildly, shouting “Ah waayyye!,” music videos are always on the TV enticing them to sway their hips and stomp their feet
-How, when leaving the computer lab or lounge after classes at my campus, I’ll approach the part of the wall that ends and lends an open corner that is always aglow with the richest, most inviting orange-pink in all the world, emanating from the Atlantic Ocean sunset, people in nice bubus milling around below as they head to their evening classes or playing basketball on the university courts, sheep and goats surely grazing behind
-Watching everyone in their beautiful bubus on Fridays, the holy day for Muslims, a constant reminder of what day of the week it is
-How many times someone nearby has said (Toubab, moom, am na xalis! (that white girl, she’s rich)). Never forget the weight of your privileged life. Find a way to lighten this, or suffer its burden when you realize you have not.
-When randomly I’ll find dismembered feet on the back staircase or random animal parts in the freezer, and think absolutely nothing of it.
-Fruit stands that stay open late on weekend nights and butiks that open late in the morning, there’s always someone on the street even when I’m coming home from dancing at 4 or 5 a.m.
-How awesomely warm, but not aggressive, the sun has been since the rainy season left and it’s cooled down.
-Turning a corner and seeing a giant baobab tree rooted between houses, it’s twisted trunk and long limbs creating a meeting space; or encountering a surprise mbalax dance and drum circle at the end of a block on any given night; or a random fooseball table surrounded by kids that’s migrated a block for no real reason.
-Two or three men sittin gon a cement bench that is built off the wall of a building, posed up like they may never leave, shakin gthe sleeves of their even more traditional bubus as they point and discuss, walking passers-by that they will greet.
-the shocked look on older Senegalese faces when you understand a bit of Wolof.
-Drying clothes on a line, blowing gently in the wind on top of a neighbor’s roof
-Constant presence and noise of all types of animals, particularly our three sheep that live in a pen on the roof, my bed placed directly below it.
-walking extremely slow because I can
-Lax (Millet grains formed into clumps and sweet/sour milk/yogurt stuff) every Sunday night for dinner, watching Yaay turn the grains in her hands in a large metal bowl for a whole hour that evening, slowly adding water and creating small clumps
-The sweet taste of Bissap (like hibiscus) juice and the great tang of a lime after a spicy dish of ceebujen (fish and rice)
-Electricity cuts! And how people will grumble the whole time, saying “Abdoulaye Wade” (the president) every few minutes
-Fat women who will inevitably point to the bench on the car rapides (small communal transport buses) to sit where there is no space, their jaye fondés (big butts) resting on top of their neighbors thighs
-The pawing hands of traditional lutteurs (wrestlers), their gris gris (blessed amulets) tied about their bodies, sand having been superstitiously placed on their chest
-Being able to buy underwear, mint leaves, and headphones in a 20 yard area
-Eating grapefruit for 75 cents every single day
-Cheeky talibé (young male beggars who were traditionally students of the Koran)
The rest is more personal, and so would do you no good. But, overwhelmed with the impossibility of saying goodbye or explaining this place in all its proper splendor, I hope this gives a further taste.
