Keeping Clean

Senegal is a dusty country, and the Senegalese are engaged in a constant battle to keep the dust and the sand off of themselves and their stuff. Every morning, if the call to prayer isn’t enough to wake me up, I can count on the neighborhood housewives and maids to do the job with the sound of their sweeping. Everyone comes out in the morning and sweeps their front steps of the sand that’s accumulated there overnight. Sometimes they even sweep the street in front of their houses, which mystifies me. At least in my neighborhood, the streets are made of sand! It’s a nice effect though; all the streets look like well groomed ski trails in the morning. If the sound of the sweeping isn’t enough, there’s a guy who comes around in the mornings selling brooms, who shouts “Balaibalaibaliabalai” to alert people that he is, in fact, selling balais (brooms). You see broom guys all over the city, especially in the residential areas, selling either short brushes made of straw or full-sized plastic brooms in pan-African yellow, red, and green.

Washing the floors is a daily chore in my house. The maid, (whose name I don’t know how to pronounce or spell properly, but is something like Tenny or Tchenning), sweeps the floors every morning with a straw brush and then mops them with a rag. When I first got here, I thought that my family was just freakishly concerned with cleanliness, that my host mom had OCD or something and forced poor Tenny to do this tedious chore that can’t be good for her back, but after a few evenings of walking around the house barefoot, I see why (I also see why no one walks around barefoot). If the floors weren’t at least swept everyday, dunes would form in the corners of the rooms.

Just a quick note about maids: lots of families here have them, or at least, lots of host families have them. In some families, the maid lives in the house and is there every day, all the time, and in others, the maid comes for the day and goes to her own home at night. The WARC staff told us that lots of live-in maids in particular are women from rural villages who have agreed to work for city families in exchange for food, shelter, and probably some money to send home.

It’s sort of hard for me to figure out what having a maid says about how well off a family is. In the US, if you have a live-in maid, you probably also have a mansion, 7 cars, and a yacht. Here, that is definitely not the case. My family does not have hot water, flushable toilets, a landline telephone, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, stereo, toaster, washer or dryer, refrigerator, microwave, computer, cable, or the Internet. They don’t have nice art or fancy furniture, but they do have a car, a food processor, a five bedroom house, and Tenny.

I don’t really know that much about Tenny (again, that name/spelling is just a guess). She understands some French but only speaks Wolof, so she and I have some trouble communicating. I don’t know where she comes from or where her family lives. My guess is that she’s in her mid-twenties and that she’s not married, or else she’d be living with her husband. She’s Muslim. She wasn’t hired until a week or so after I first arrived, and I suspect that the money my family gets from Wells in order to cover the expense of keeping me plays an important role in keeping her, too.

When we first got here, the WARC staff told us that many of us would likely be living in houses with maids, and that this has been a problem for some of their more socially sensitive students in the past, who have thought that the maids’ work package seemed awfully close to slave labor. They emphasized that no, the maids are not slaves and are free to go whenever they want, but that especially for rural girls, domestic service like this is a pretty good gig. I trust that they know what they’re talking about, and Tenny certainly isn’t abused here or anything, but there are aspects of the situation that make my sense of social justice tingle. Tenny puts in long hours, and although I think a lot of those hours are spent watching TV, the majority of them are spent cooking and cleaning, and there are none of those fancy modern appliances that make housework such a joy these days. My siblings can also be pretty liberal with the criticism sometimes, and have no qualms about telling Tenny that she’s stupid or disrespectful, and a terrible cook (though no one ever leaves any food uneaten and it all seems good to me). They also are perfectly comfortable changing the channel on the TV when Tenny is watching something, whereas they always ask me if I’m watching whatever is on, even if its all in Wolof and there’s no way I could be following what’s going on. I’ve also never seen her get paid, although that’s not necessarily a transaction that I would expect to happen right in front of me.

All that said, there are times when it seems like Tenny is part of the family like Fatima or Moussouba. She always eats with us, and she laughs and jokes with everyone much more often than she gets reprimanded for doing something wrong. The kids all do decent portion of the housework, too. Everyone will do some of their own laundry during the week as they have need, though someone comes every week or two to do the bulk of it at once. Everyone picks up after themselves, too. Mom, if the Sagna family lived in our house, the kitchen counter would always be spotless and there would never be socks or newspapers all over the den (the fact that no one reads the newspaper or wears socks might have something to do with this). Everyone knows how to cook, too, and Moussouba and Kiki sometimes help to make meals or just do the whole thing themselves. It’s true that my host mom is sort of imperious with Tenny, but she’s kind of like that with all the kids too.

Okay, so that “quick note” about maids turned into a long tangent. Back to our regularly scheduled programming about cleanliness in Senegal.

Aside from the floors, the other thing that I see people washing all the time is their car. I walk back from school at around the same time that the daytime taxi drivers are done with their shifts. The taxis will be parked on the sides of the roads getting their daily scrub down, either from the driver or from a young kid that the driver probably tossed some change to. Kiki, too, will wash the family car fairly often (it doesn’t get driven around as much as a taxi, so it doesn’t get dirty enough to merit daily washing), and if you’re just walking around the neighborhood, you will inevitably see someone with a bucket and a rag. Because I don’t know anything about cars, I don’t know if the dust is damaging to the cars and therefore needs to be washed off, or if the people here just like to have really shiny clean cars. Neither one would be surprising to me.

The next thing that it is important to keep clean in Senegal is your self. Actually, this is probably the most important thing, but since the bulk of this task is done in private, it’s less obvious that everyone is doing it. At our orientation, the staff told us that we MUST take AT LEAST one shower every day, or our families would be totally grossed out and horrified. Problems had arisen in the past with students who were spacing their showers out over several days because they couldn’t stand washing with cold water, and their families complained about their bad hygiene.

Showering was something that was sort of a question mark before I got here. We were told that we would have access to a shower everyday, but I was concerned that using that much water would be an expensive burden for my family, or that it wouldn’t even really be available at all. This is Africa after all, it’s all poor and desert-y. At least in Dakar, though, water is not a big problem, as far as I can tell. Everyone’s very careful not to waste much water, but the tap always works, and if something needs to be washed or rinsed or boiled, go for it. I have seen news reports on TV of villages and cities a little deeper into the bush that have water shortages (Touba in particular is notorious for water shortages), but in Dakar, everything seems to be in decent shape.

What you certainly don’t get is hot water out of a tap. The last time I had hot tap water was in the hotel the very first night I got here. At home, if you want hot water, you have to heat it on the propane tank. The first few weeks that I was here, someone in my family would heat water for me and then pour it into a bucket for me to wash with. I would stand in the bathtub in the bathroom and wash by pouring water from the bucket over myself with a cup. This was okay, and having hot, or at least warm, water was certainly nice, but it was really hard for me to wash my hair well like that, so I’ve since switched to showering with the cold shower head. It’s certainly bracing in the chilly mornings, but you get used to it.

You definitely understand why people here wash sometimes even two or three times a day. The dust that gets on the floors and the cars get on you too, in addition to all the pollution in the air and whatever sweat you produce when it gets warm in the afternoons. When it gets to be really hot here all the time, it’s going to be pretty gross. At least then a cold shower will feel really good.

In addition to daily full-body washing, you’ll often see people washing their hands, head, and feet in the middle of the street in the middle of the day. Just about every market stall or cart or shop will have what looks like a plastic teakettle stashed in a corner somewhere, which people use for more targeted washing throughout the day. I think being clean, and having clean feet in particular, is very important before you pray. You’ll see people washing with the teakettles in big groups all at the same time, and there are often tiled benches with spigots outside of mosques where people wash their feet before they go in to pray.

In the US, we have a different soap for every task, but in Senegal, soap is marketed by how many different things it can be used for. Dishes, laundry, and body, all in one? Great!