Travels with Tavish

Ramadan is over--there will be no more fasting in my village until next April! (Ramadan and other Musilm holidays are determined by the lunar calendar, so the dates move up about 10 days every year. Next year Ramadan will likely start during the last few days of April). I ended with a grand total of 19 days of fasting dawn-to-dusk (I didn't fast while outside my village). I did drink water while fasting, making my 19 days of fasting seem a small feat when compared to the adults all over Senegal who fasted without food or water for 29 days. After some unusual stomach pains I endured during the first five days or so, the fasting became relatively easy. It was even easy to get back into after taking ten days "off" when I went to Mbour. During the last nine days of Ramadan I got into a good routine of going on a short jog just before we broke fast. The sweltering heat subsides a bit after 6:30pm, so I had time to fit this in before eating around 7:30. As predicted, my fami...

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 ...

 Some May pictures from my village: The sunsets are beautiful here but difficult to capture in photos See above comment about sunsets  Ditto above My friend Balla making a bed out of bankala, a palm-like tree that is used to make almost all the furniture in my village. Here he is measuring out where to cut the bankala Cutting the bankala by whacking a machete with a wooden club Arranging the cut pieces of bankala Balla's friend making "nails" out of bamboo to hold the bed together Spot the lizard Taking my dad's bike to the forage to get water. Now that I don't have plants to water in my backyard, I use approximately one bidong (20L) of water a day. On laundry days I usually have to pump an additional two bidongs Women gather huge stores of firewood for cooking before the rains come and everything in the forest gets soaked. They have been going every afternoon for many weeks now, carrying back one load at a ...

Near the end of May, I took a few days of vacation to visit Saly, a beach town on the west coast of Senegal, with a couple friends from my stage. It was great to take a little break from the heat of Kedougou and the challenge of Ramadan fasting in my village. We spent a lot of time reading, doing crossword puzzles, hanging out by the pool, and cooking. Including our transit days, I read 4 books (all pretty quick reads) during the trip. Everything that we had and did in Saly was something that I don't do in my village: cooking in a European-style kitchen with running water, swimming in the pool and ocean, using a washing machine, having a refrigerator, sleeping in a cool room, going to the grocery store. Other than walking around the streets of Saly, the only part of our trip that reminded me I was in Senegal was when the water stopped working for the last 24 hours of our visit. I got one bucket of water from a spicket that was connected to a well (so it did not shut off when the...