Yesterday we had our first formal invitation for a dinner (yes, this time they said “dinner” when they invited us over the phone). It was an overwhelmingly positive experience – kudos for the Senegalese Teranga*!!
Since the families (two families, his and hers) live in Guédaiwaye, which is more than one hour away from our place in Ouakam, the first problem was: how do we get there at rush hour? Option 1: cab = 3.000 – 4.000 FCFA and anyways we don’t really know where we’re going. Option 2: mass transit – but how?!? And then P said: “don’t you fret, kids: I’ll pick you up.” Awesome!! He came to our door in his BMW with his chauffeur (pheew, not a bad idea to wear my best clothing! This is a serious occasion …). And as we hopped over and around the obstacles in the way on the paved, unpaved, and sandy streets of Grand Dakar on our way to our first stop (his jewelery store in Pikin) we chatted and chatted. He showed us some pictures of his family on his laptop – as our car overtook a donkey cart while trying to avoid a giant gap on the pavement, and later on, a group of kids had to push us to get out of the sand … If I had to describe him very briefly, I’d say that P is a business man through and through – and a very gentle one. We chatted about M (his wife, who migrated to Spain few months ago), and he said she may leave for France as early as this week to try her luck there because Spain is not treating her well. (This week already!!) We chatted about Africa, and he said he believes change will come through the Modou-Modou (lucky migrants) and small business people. We talked about Senegal, and he beamed with pride about his country as much as he complained about the state of affairs and the political class. He said: we’d be much better off if our president was a toubab, he’d run the country better. He had very interesting views on politics, businesses and her wife. And he spends a week a month elsewhere (Dubai, Belgium, the US) trading his merchandise. I don’t think this is your average Senegalese citizen, but he was wonderful nonetheless.
Stop #1 was his store in Pikin, a small place packed with mostly hand-crafted African –style jewelery. I specify, because it is very different from the one that one would find at a Western store (in fact, he has another store in Downtown Dakar where he sells a very different stock aimed mostly at tourists). I could recognise many of the designs, very large, yet hollow, rings, earrings, necklaces … I had seen them in Spain, being worn by Senegalese women at religious celebrations – I had quite literally been blinded and almost killed by one of them at a certain occasion (no joke, see picture below). “Very large” is a euphemism to describe these pieces of engineering. However, one has to keep in mind that this jewelery is not only decorative, but above all an investment: in a place where saving is pretty much impossible for a variety of reasons, women buy gold when it’s cheap and sell it in times of trouble. If one thinks that this gold may be all that a woman has if she needs to provide for her family in case that, for whatever reason, her husband cannot do it, then this ring may not seem as large …
Photo by Rafa Manzano.Stop #2 was his place. His large, large, large, place in Guedawaiye: a 5-story building that housed P’s parents and the families of his 5 siblings. He gave us a brief tour around the building and then took us to his place on the top floor, where for a while we sat at two enormous sofas while drinking some juice and kept on talking about many things (is that you in that picture? Yes, that’s when I made my pilgrimage to the Meca. Did you really go all the way there on foot?? No, no, no, and he laughs: I took a plane!! Oops.) We must go to M’s mum’s place for dinner, and so we go back downstairs to have some pictures taken with his family. When we’re placing ourselves (about 20 people) to fit into the picture, I reach for a two-year old boy who is standing in front of me with his eyes wide open. He sees my hand approaching, his face cringes in terror and he runs away from me crying … Oh, excusez moi, many of these kids have never been a white person... The other kids are cracking up and they want to shake our hands. “How are you doing, Toubab, nice to meet you!!” I just can’t stop laughing, even the term is slightly insulting …
After shaking many, many little hands we go to stop #3: dinner!! I’ve been dying to meet M's mum and the rest of her family. This house is not as big, but her family is equally warm and M's mum must have insisted a lot to win us on the race to feed the toubabs (that’s what P has told us, anyways). We talk for a while and then the food comes … a giant round silver place with a magnificent cover. We must sit on the floor to eat with our hands – may the Gods assist us today, I think as I look at the giant plate: last time I ate with my hands I was at an Ethiopian wedding celebration in Minnesota, and I, the only white person in the room, could feel the many pairs of eyes looking at the rivers of grease that run down my arms, my cheeks, my earlobes … We refuse the cutlery and learn how to wash our hands in a little basin. Test 1: passed. Now goes the difficult part: how do two heavily left-handed people with not much skill succeed in this situation using only the right hand to eat (one cannot use the left hand for important stuff here)? Well, they do their best. And thus, slowly but surely, we attack the round tray (50 cms of shiny diameter) which had a whole stuffed chicken lavishly garnished with fries, salad, hard boiled eggs, carrot, etc. [Vege-quoi, you said?] I very soon realize that there’s only one woman in the room (and WHO could that be?) but the conversation is so very interesting, the food is so good, and I am so very grateful to be their guest, that I soon forget about it and lose track of time.
… her little brother, who is a taylor and couldn’t go to school, sees my little book (“Wolof de Poche”) and says: “Wow, I’ve always wanted to learn to write and read French, do you think you could help me find a book for that?” And then I remember that the first thing his sister asked me was: “I’m dying to go back to school, do you know of any scholarships that I could apply for?” Oh no, I think I like this family too much!
* Teranga = hospitality.
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