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Attaya: A Senegalese Tea Tradition

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Throughout my time in Senegal, across many regions and languages, the most unifying cultural force I have observed is attaya, Senegalese tea. My CBT family (local host family in Mbour) makes attaya once a day. My host dad in Kedougou makes it twice a day. Other families I have spent time with fall somewhere in between. Each puts their individual spin on it, but the process is generally pretty consistent. I will describe below how attaya is often made in my village, but small variations do occur among families. Attaya is made with a 100 CFA packet of green tea imported from China. These packets are sold in every boutique in Senegal. Even my village, which does not have a boutique, has multiple people who sell tea out of their homes. Conveniently, the same places that sell tea also sell 100 CFA bags of sugar; one bag is the amount of sugar needed to make attaya. Attaya is made in three rounds, so each person gets three small glasses of tea. In each round, more sugar is added to ...
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Diakhanke (Jaxanke) Greetings and Phrases Part 1

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Greetings are a very important part of Senegalese culture. They are the first sentences you say to anyone you see, no matter your relation to that person. If you do not greet someone, they will not be willing to answer any of your questions or help you. If you greet someone, they will generally be more than willing. This applies to family members, neighbors, boutique owners, people sitting in a restaurant you walked into, and everyone else. With someone you know well, greetings are usually longer. If you walk into a space with lots of people, a simple "Asalaam maalekum" will usually suffice. I am breaking this post into two parts because there are a lot of potential greetings that one can use in any given interaction. Below are some of the most common greetings in my village. I have also uploaded some short conversations with people in my village so that you can listen. Not every greeting is on this list, but I'll try to cover most of the rest in Part 2 of this post. ...
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Business as Usual: Dondin, dondin (little by little)

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Timing is very different in Senegal than in the US. Here, often people do not show up on time or at all. Or sometimes they all show up at the appointed time--it's hard to figure out which type of event will have which type of attendance. A couple short anecdotes: (1) During the middle of April I went over to my counterpart Amadou's house to try and pick a date for our upcoming tree sac filling training. I knew that I would be out of the village during the last week in April for a cashew training and that Ramadan will start approximately May 5. That leaves only about 5-7 days in which we could hold a training before people in the village will start fasting for Ramadan. As I have heard from other older volunteers, the capacity to and interest in doing work steeply declines for people in the village who fast (which will be almost everyone in my village). Thus my interest in choosing a date for the training and spreading the word as soon as possible. There is a lot of inertia wi...
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