Easter

Pictures from Easter and my birthday

This weekend I celebrated Easter with my host family. I started off Holy Week by forgetting that it was Palm Sunday and not realizing why my host mom seemed especially annoyed that I said I wasn’t going to Mass as opposed to any of the other times when I say I’m not going to Mass. Whoops.

As a side note, it’s not that I don’t like going to Mass with my family. In fact, I thought it would be something I would really enjoy. It would be a cool chance for me to get to see how another people worships, see some really fantastic Senegalese outfits, and get my host mom to like me. Unfortunately, every time I’ve gone I’ve nearly fallen asleep because I can’t pay attention. I can’t follow the service because there are no bulletins and no prayer books, and even though the services are in French, I can’t understand what the priest is saying. At this point, my listening comprehension is pretty stellar, but it’s crippled in places with less than perfect acoustics, or when there’s a lot of ambient noise. I can’t understand when I can’t hear clearly, and the church they go to is big and echo-y, a problem which is then compounded by the microphone/speaker system that they have going on in there. Plus, Fatima tells me that the priest is from Côte d’Ivoire and speaks French with an Ivoirian accent, which is apparently stronger than a Senegalese accent. She said that even she has trouble catching everything he says all the time, so there’s basically no hope for me. I did try, really, but when I can’t understand anything, it’s hard to appreciate.

On Good Friday, I participated in a Senegalese Catholic tradition that even Muslims look forward to, and that is ngalax. Ngalax is a really . . . interesting dish that Catholics make for Easter weekend in ridiculously enormous quantities and then distribute to everyone in their neighborhoods, even the Muslims. When I had class on Friday afternoon, all of us Americans with Catholic families were talking about how much ngalax was in our house and alerting those of with Muslim families that in all likelihood that’s what would be for dinner in their houses too.

Ngalax is kind of like soup, only its served cold. Its primary ingredients are bouye (called pain de singe in French, which is “monkey bread” in English. It’s the fruit from the baobab trees), pâte d’arachide (not peanut butter, but close), and mil (millet). On Thursday night, Moussouba and some female relative (who’s name I really should know by now but don’t, and who, for the purposes of this entry, will be called the Aunt) produced a couple huge sacks of pain de singe and put them in a couple huge buckets of water to soak over night. (Huge buckets, I’m telling you. We do laundry in these buckets. And there were three of them). Pain de singe has this weird Styrofoamy texture, and it dissolves in water, leaving behind a ton of big brown seeds, like beans, and a bunch of pink stringy stuff. In the morning, Moussouba and the Aunt sifted out all the seeds and strings and added sugar at least and maybe milk also (I wasn’t actually there for this). The cloudy white result is actually the form that pain de singe takes most often in daily life, as a popular beverage.

To the huge buckets of bouye, they added proportionally huge globs of pâte d’arachide, which they mixed with their hands. They then poured it all through a sieve, several times, until it had a smooth, uniform consistency and was almost as thin as water. Because there was so much of it, this sieving step took hours. I had to go to class before they were finished, which bummed me out because I wanted to go delivering with them. Judging from the final product, the last step just involved stirring in ton of cooked millet. It looks like tomato soup with couscous in it, sort of.

What does it taste like? Well, everyone here LOVES it, and you could tell that Moussouba and the Aunt, even though it was a lot of work, really enjoyed making it. Ngalax is their baklava; it’s the thing that they make together as a family and enjoy together on an important holiday, so it occupies a kind of mythic position. Just like it wouldn’t be Easter for me without some baklava and day-old Peeps, it wouldn’t be Easter here without ngalax.

I appreciate and understand all that, but I am a little . . . dismayed at the amount of ngalax still in the house. I don’t quite share their enthusiasm for this particular dish. For me, it’s a combination of three things that are difficult for me on their own, and don’t get any better by being mixed all together. Pain de singe is tangy and sour; pâte d’arachide is hauntingly like peanut butter, but a lot more bitter; millet is just tasteless texture, but they tend to pair it with the very few sauces that I don’t really like here, so I associate it with some of my rougher nights at the wire-spool. All together, ngalax is a cold, soupy, tangy, sour, peanut-y, bitter, grainy experience. It’s not awful, but I wouldn’t order it off a menu. And that’s what will be for breakfast for the foreseeable future, because not only do we have our own leftovers, but we also have samples from all the other Catholics in the neighborhood. Ngalax is like chocolate chip cookies, in that every family has their own recipe (or at least, their own idea of “this looks right.” There are no recipes for Senegalese food). I tried several different ngalaxs, and you can definitely tell when the ratios are different. One had so much pain de singe in it that they shouldn’t have bothered adding anything else.

So that was the thing that happened on Friday. On Saturday, everyone went to midnight Mass (which starts at 10, not midnight), but everyone left at a different time and went to a different church. My host mom and Fatima probably went to the Martyrs of Uganda church, I have no idea where Anita went, and Moussouba and I went to St. Christophe, Habibou’s church up next to the airport. Blaise, who was at home on vacation from his school in Thiès for the whole week, went to the big cathedral downtown, I think. I have no idea what Danny and Kiki did. They might not have even gone to Mass that night, because they went the next morning.

We got very dressed up for this. Anita and Fatima both replaced their braids with long, straight weaves (hairdressing in Senegal is a whole ‘nother blog entry), and Effie even did me up in some braids. My sisters have been planning to me tresser for Easter for months now, and I was a little nervous to let them take another stab at beautifying me after the Moussouba-does-my-makeup incident. But all they had Effie do were short cornrows not even half way back from my forehead, with the rest loose, and I like it. Alhamdoulilah.

Anyway, we got all dressed up and then took pictures together, like it was prom instead of Easter, and then went to church. I had an easier time understanding the service at St. Christophe because their acoustics were a lot better and their priest was Senegalese, but I still struggled with staying awake because the service was very long. I felt less bad about this when Blaise, who wants to become a priest, told me the next day that he had trouble saying awake at whatever Mass he was at too. Mass got out at about 1 AM, and then we said hello and Alleluia to a lot of people. We also did les bises a lot more often than usual, which is always sort of a problem for me. Les bises is the French cheek-kissing thing, which is a really common form of greeting in Senegal, particularly among Catholics in my experience. In addition to the fact that kissing strangers can be a little awkward for Americans in the first place, les bises are also dangerously unregulated in Senegal. You kiss people anywhere from 0 to 4 times and there is, as far as I can tell, no way to tell how many times you’re supposed to do it. I also never know which way I’m supposed to go first, left or right, because I’ve had people pull both on me. This means I often end up continuing to kiss people after they’ve finished kissing me, or pulling away before they’re done, or kissing parts of their face that I had no intention of kissing. I’m always so relieved to see a hand extended towards me, because I can usually be trusted not to look like an idiot shaking hands. Sometimes, however I do get teased for my firm American grip. Maybe it’s because the Senegalese shake so many hands so many times a day and they can’t be bothered to put in the effort every time, but the dead-fish grip is a lot more common here than at home.

After church we walked to Habibou’s house and had a 2 AM snack of reheated meat and goat-foot soup, and after that we took a taxi to a community center in another neighborhood, where there was a big dance party going on. It would appear that in Senegal, spending the night partying with your friends at Easter is just as important as spending the day visiting with your family. We stayed there and danced for a while, and then came home around 5 AM. It was a long night.

The next day, Easter Sunday, the first person I saw in the morning was my host mom. We said Joyeux Fête, and then she told me that she wanted me to stay at home this afternoon instead of going out with Moussouba, who had invited me to come along to visit her grandmother. I was a little surprised and didn’t understand why, but since she hardly ever asks me to do anything and seemed oddly insistent about it, I said okay. Later, when she had left for Mass, I asked Fatima why she wanted me to stay home. Fatima told me that there is some ill-will between the grandmother, who I believe is my absent host father’s mother, and my host mom. Apparently, the grandmother doesn’t want my host mom living in the house (which probably belongs solely to my host dad), and, I kid you not, my host mom thinks the grandmother wants to kill her. She won’t go there and she doesn’t let Kiki or Fatima go there, because she is afraid that the grandmother will put something in their food and poison them. She didn’t want me to go because she was similarly concerned for me. This revelation pretty much confirmed a suspicion that I’ve had for some time now: my host mom is a nut job.

I spent the morning hanging out with my sisters in the kitchen while they cooked yassa (a variation of the usual rice and onion sauce, usually chicken but sometimes with meat or fish, and my favorite Senegalese dish). Right before what’s usually lunchtime, Anita and Moussouba were in the back hall, clearly getting ready to go out somewhere. My host mom came around the corner and saw me standing around with them as was like, “Oh do you want to go out with them?” I didn’t know for sure where they were going, but Habibou had showed up and Moussouba had invited me to go and visit a friend of hers and Habibou’s that I had met the night before, separately from the invitation to see the grandmother. I thought that that was where we were going, so I said yes. My host mom was like, “Okay, go ahead then,” so I left with Anita, Moussouba, and Habibou.

And then we definitely went to the grandmother’s house. I have given up trying to understand my host family at all.

We spent the afternoon visiting with the grandmother and a slew of aunts and cousins. We ate yassa (which made me happy, because I thought I was going to miss it at home) and then I sat on the couch and listened uncomprehendingly to Wolof conversations for an awfully long time. Habibou, too, was similarly lost, because he is a Nigerian Hausa and doesn’t speak Wolof either. Everyone there knew this, but kept speaking Wolof anyway. The WARC staff has told us that we can and should ask people to speak French around us so that we can participate in the conversations, but clearly none of them have ever tried to impose the language of the colonizers on a family matriarch that they just met on an important holiday. Even if it seemed a little rude for them to ignore Habibou and me like that, it seemed even ruder to ask them to speak French. So I listened and tried to pick out whatever words I could. I heard “jëkkër” a lot, which means “husband.”

We left in the late afternoon and went to go to Moussouba and Habibou’s friend’s house, which was slightly dismaying to me because between my late night and my futile straining to understand hours and hours of Wolof, I was exhausted. We got to the neighborhood, made a pit stop at an uncle’s house, who wasn’t there, and then tried to find the friend’s house. In the time before we got there, Moussouba told Habibou that she was tired and wanted to go back home, so we did that instead. Thank God. I crawled into bed at about 7 with every intention of just taking a nap, and then slept until 9 the next morning. I was very glad that in Senegal, Easter Monday is a national holiday, so I didn’t have class. All in all, it was a very different Easter weekend than I would have had at home. I spent a lot of quality time with my host family and did new and different things, which was good, but I will be happy to be home for Easter next year. I missed the Anglican hymns and the baklava and the egg game and the jellybeans and the people a whole lot.