The Ghost of Tabaski

My relationship with animals in this country has been well-documented.  From the nightly terror of strange sounds in my bedroom to the ram who tried to kill me, from the microscopic bugs who invaded every surface of my house to the cockroach who furrows into my blanket each night as though he is my puppy – I think it’s safe to say I pretty much hate them all.  Some of my friends have semi-cute domesticated puppies and kittens, but honestly, I can’t look at them without thinking about opportunistic infections.  Any inkling of pet companionship is safely eclipsed by my desire to sleep through the night, not get rabies, and live another year.  Boo to animals.

But all of the preceding moments of animal disgust, trauma, and fright were nothing compared to what happened to me on the morning of October 29.  I had just wrapped up a lovely Tabaski weekend with my family.  Tabaski, you may remember, is the holiday commemorating Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son, and God’s subsequent pardon to replace the boy with a sheep instead.  Last year, my family killed three sheep for 11 people.  This year, because as my host mom says, “EVERY YEAR WE MUST GET BETTER AND DO MORE!”, we killed four sheep for 11 people.  I had given my host mom some money for Tabaski, not realizing that I was signing myself up to split a sheep with her.  This was our sheep:

Maimouna poses with my goat.  Handsome thing.

Tabaski came and went with the usual fanfare.  The men sharpened their swords with glee, the women pulled up lawn chairs to watch the slaughter.  If you imagine Tabaski as a solemn ritual sacrifice, you shouldn’t come to my house.  It was like a spectator sport, in a good way, and actually kind of brought to mind the hog roasts of my childhood, minus the beer.  The only exception was my little host brother Mohammad who spent most of the day staring off into space.  Luckily, my host mom had a simple explanation: “Oh, he’s just reflecting on the murders.”  She insisted that this year, Mohammad grasped that he watched four goats die a bloody death.  She may have been right. 

Mohammad, traumatized.  Bigue, age 5, is clearly used to this whole Tabaski thing by now. Also, I hope everyone likes my "working Senegalese woman's outfit" and blood-smeared forehead.

Anyway, so Tabaski was great.  I woke up Monday morning, three days after Tabaski, crawled out of my mosquito net, and pushed open to the door to my bathroom.  And that -- that’s when I saw them.

Maggots.  Hundreds and hundreds of maggots. 

Covering the floor of my shower.  Crawling down the walls.  Squirming and shaking all over my shampoo bottles, my toothbrush, my toothpaste.  Inside my soap.  Around my razor.  Collectively, all of their movements were so spastic that I thought I might just be experiencing a rush of blood to the head, like seeing stars, maggot-shaped stars.  Over the past year and a half, I have seen three cockroaches in that bathroom.  I had never seen one maggot. 

But no, this was real.  And they were actually physically everywhere.  Everywhere.  It was like a Hitchcock movie. 

Obviously, I took no photos of the maggots because I was frozen in the clutches of insanity.  If you want some good comparisons, I’m sure you could google “maggot images” and begin to imagine my life. 

I backed away from the bathroom and practically fell down trying to escape my house.  I grabbed the first host sister I saw and managed to express my wish for her to follow me.  She was skeptical, as the entire family is, of my fears.  A few weeks earlier, I had stepped on what I still contend was a snake, though they said “It was just a really huge fast moving black worm that must have crawled out of the toilet, we have them in our house all the time.”  That incident had involved me screaming a lot, and them making fun of me a lot.  So reluctantly, Mame followed me into my bathroom.

Inside, she took a look, and the expression on her face stayed steady.  “Oh,” she said.  “Insects.” 

I stared at her.  “Insects?”  I repeated.  “Insects?  I KNOW they are insects!  What are they doing here?  WHY?  I have never seen this insect before!  WHAT ARE THESE?” 

She started sweeping them up with her broom, vainly trying to get them into the dustpan before they’d, literally, worm their way out.  “Hmm,” she mused.  “Maybe because of the sheep we are drying on your roof?”

Hmm.  Maybe because of the DEAD SHEEP SITTING ON THE ROOF OF MY BATHROOM?  You think?  YOU THINK??? 

“Oh.  Yes.  That makes sense,” I replied, trying to match her level of calm.  Not understanding why all of the dead sheep were ON THE ROOF OF MY BATHROOM. 

“Yes, the dead sheep,” she replied.  “Well, just keep sweeping them out.”

And then, taking a great deal of maggots in her dustpan, Mame left me to my bathroom, and the maggots that were continuing to creep through the walls, down my drain, and congregate under any solitary object.  Every time I lifted up anything, I’d find a new club of maggots had already formed beneath.  Over the course of the day, I swept about six or seven times until my host mom finally told me that they’d removed the dead animals from my roof.  Eventually, I poured an entire jar of bleach all over my bathroom. I did feel lucky that the maggots had favored that locale instead of my bedroom. 

But even after the bleaching, something was still off.  For one, dead maggots kept appearing in the bathroom.  Did you know that when a white maggot dies, it turns black and resembles lizard poop?  I learned a lot of things.  But worse than the sight of dead maggots was the smell that permeated my room for days.  I didn’t know if the smell was dead maggots in my drains or weird pieces of sheep meat lingering in secret places or, in my worst nightmares, beagle-sized rats rotting in unrelated incidents under my bookcase.  Sometimes it was hard to breathe.  I tried to ignore it.

And then, when I awoke on Friday morning and started my usual routine of laying in my bed for awhile, I look outside of my mosquito net to see it covered in gigantic bot flies.  Thanks to Emily Kraus, a former PCV and bug expert, I had learned all about the different kinds of flies a few months ago.  And these were the giant, nasty flies that feed on rotting carcasses.  My room was full of them.  Apparently, the maggots who had survived the sweeping-bleaching-angry Lisa epidemic had finally hatched.  And clearly, they were the most reproductively fit, which translated into grotesquely big bodies, wings, eyes, and a penchant for blood.  Again, boo to animals.

Flies are hard to kill.  But luckily, I was headed out for the weekend, so I only had to deal with them for a few hours.  When I left, my little house was in quite a sorry state, smelling like a combination of poop, dead animals, and rotting cheese while also covered in flies.  I figured that when I returned in two days, one of two things would happen: everything would be miraculously dead and better, or everything would be miraculously alive and worse.  One of my friends added a third possibility that involved Jeff Goldblum crouched on my toilet, waiting for me to come home.

Luckily, I returned from my weekend to find all of the flies not only dead, but gone (surely a testament to my gecko population), and the smell mysteriously dissipated.  A Tabaski miracle! 

So now, the maggots and their adult selves are a thing of the past, but I still do live in fear.   On the other hand, this elevated experience of terror really has made other things pale in comparison.  For instance, the cockroach that creeps into my bed every night really does seem like a harmless puppy compared to a cult of maggots watching me bathe.  For this, I am thankful.  Ultimately, I’m looking forward to erasing these memories with new, upcoming holidays, like Tamharit and Thanksgiving and Christmas and President’s Day, and hoping that they don’t inspire lingering ghosts of dead animals to come and take vengeance on me days later.

America's Careless Whispers

When I first came to Senegal, I remember being acutely aware of how much I was missing in any given moment.  Words flew by in conversation, people laughed, people screamed, and I grew accustomed to never knowing what was going on.  Eventually, I learned to listen for key phrases, smile, and nod, but at the end of the day, I’m still just trudging through, picking up scraps of knowledge like a starving dog.

I’ve noticed this pattern most with television.  At my house, the TV gets turned on before dinner and keeps us all company for the next few hours.  If I don’t have anything else to do, I sit with my family under the semblance of “watching,” but really, I usually end up staring at the TV with my mind everywhere else.  Lately this has backfired in a number of ways.  For instance, the other day it took me a good five minutes before I even realized that the soccer commentary I was watching was in English.  Even then, I found I was so used to blocking out the TV’s words that I could barely follow what was being said.  

Anyway, I give you all this background to illustrate how hard it is to come by news here.  Sure, I’m on the internet a few times a week, but reading all of the headlines at such sporadic intervals isn’t something I’ve gotten used to.  And I would love to know not only the news, but how Senegalese people see it: unfortunately, French and Wolof snippets can only get me so far.   So, ashamedly, I admit that I've mostly given up on keeping up.

Until.  A miracle happened.  And I stumbled upon a Saturday afternoon program called “E-Mag: English Language Magazine.”  THE NEWS, VIA SENEGALESE JOURNALISTS, IN ENGLISH. 

This picture has nothing to do with anything, but I realized I don't put a lot of pictures on my blog anymore.  I guess it does show Bigue, the child I taught about term limits.  This is us at Korite 2012.

Finally!  Finally, for the first time in my service, I had the chance to hear the nuances, biases, jokes, opinions, confusions, and perception of the Senegalese media in my mother tongue!  I fully admit that I’m a connotation nerd.  But after 19 months of prying for simple facts, understanding every single word would fascinate you too.

E-Mag started off by covering local events, such as President Macky Sall’s replacement of numerous cabinet ministers.  I knew it happened, but suddenly, in English, I understood WHY and HOW.  Amazing!  But E-Mag only got better from there.  The second segment was a commentary about Hurricane Sandy coverage.  Basically, the narrator criticized African journalists for dedicating so many days and so much airspace to an event so far removed from African lives.  And I have to say, I somewhat agree with him.  He spoke of the numerous floods and famines that had rocked the African continent all year, questioning why those events didn’t deserve as much, if not more, media coverage.  It was quite a passionate and convincing plea for local journalism.  It also made me wonder if sometimes when I passingly hear references to the “United States of America” on the news, if I’m not hearing a factual story, but a vitriolic cry of anger.  Hmm.

More unrelated pictures.  Tabaski 2012!  I don't know who took this picture or why it turned out this way... like all Senegalese parties with my family, no alcohol was involved.

The next segment moved into International News, and the only story was Hurricane Sandy.  So apparently the editors were willing to give Mr. Commentary a platform, but not indulge his ideas.  So it goes.

Hurricane coverage, from a Senegalese perspective, was pretty interesting too.  They approached it with the utmost seriousness, despite the fact that flooding in Dakar over a 6 week period this past rainy season was probably far more disease-ridden and destructive than Sandy’s aftermath.  No one on the Senegalese news mentioned that fact though.  Instead, they sympathized and surveyed Sandy’s damage and interviewed her disenfranchised just as any American network would.  It’s strange—personal catastrophe is just so much different in America than here: yet no one brought up the comparison, and no one presented a pertinent point of reference.  I watched the reporter interview a New Jersey man who lost all of his independent construction business supplies to neighborhood looters.  It was incredibly sad, and I felt for him.  But highlighting it and showing it on Senegalese TV did feel weird, I’m not going to lie.  Despite the concern my family and friends here have voiced about the hurricane, I can’t help but wonder what they’re thinking, secretly, as they watch.  Here, losing everything you own to looters is a slow Tuesday, natural disasters rip apart neighborhoods yearly, and no one has any carpet to replace, because they realize it would only get ruined anyway.  Consequently, I can’t figure out what they make of American problems.

But the last segment of the show was my favorite: American election coverage!  To discuss the elections, the show invited a University Cheikh Anta Diop professor of American Politics and English to answer some questions. 

First, they asked him, “Why is this election important?”  He responded, and I’ve tried to make this verbatim, “Well, first of all, this is the first time, you see, that a black American president is running for a second term.  Second of all, the world is in an economic crisis and recession.  Third of all, Hurricane Sandy.”  All of these are true facts.  But I love the fact that for all of the months and years of election mumbo-jumbo we are bombarded with in America, all of the analyses and criticisms and commentaries, this man sums up how Senegal sees all of it in one, plain sentence. 

Not done with pictures that have no basis.  This year for Halloween, I made a Rice Krispie treat ghost!  But the store only had Cocoa Krispies... so it was a Senegalese ghost.  My family ate that up.  Literally and figuratively.

Then they asked the scholar how the American election system works.  In what may be the best thing I’ve heard all month, he answered, “The system... it is... very sick.  It is a sick system.  It is a complicated system, and it is a sick system.  The system is sick.”  He then delved into a slightly more detailed description of the electoral college and the travesties it can inspire, pointing specifically to the case of Al Gore.  I tried to explain the electoral college to my host mom tonight too.  She made a disgusted face.  It is a sick system.

So thanks to E-mag, my horizons were properly expanded last week.  But the election-inspired enlightenment was far from over.  On the following Tuesday, Kathleen, Jenna (a new embassy fellow), and our Senegalese co-teachers articulated the key points of Romney and Obama for our English class in order to have a mock election.  It shouldn’t come as a surprise that on the whole, Senegalese, and most of Sub-Saharan Africa, are a little obsessed with Obama.  But, in an effort to talk about politics and making informed voting decisions, we decided to really articulate what each candidate stood for.  Immigration.  Economics.  Foreign Policy. Guns. Birth Control.  And perhaps most importantly...

Gay Marriage.

As much as I would love for all of Senegal to continue their unbridled love for Obama, I think a lot of them learned that he and American politics are far more complicated than they realized.  Senegal is a notoriously homophobic country, and homosexual acts can lead to imprisonment here.  Abortions are also illegal and hardly an issue for debate.  Kathleen and I did our best to articulate how most of these issues boil down to government involvement versus personal choice, and I told the class they needed to really consider which issues were most important to them: they probably wouldn’t agree with either candidate on every point.  When we tallied up our mini election after class, Obama was winning by merely one vote.   

Today my five year old host sister, Bigue, asked me if Obama’s next term would be for 20 years, not far off the crazy term of Senegal’s previous president.  I told her that American presidents get four and sometimes eight years at the most.  She didn’t believe me, but last April, the Senegalese people came out en masse to kick out their long-serving leader, 64% to 36%.  They understood what needed to be done.  They did it.  Eventually, and hopefully, they have started to ensure that Senegalese five year olds stop seeing 20 year terms as normal.

So in honor of Election Day, this is my contribution.  Here’s to everyone’s attempt to find out the real story, to hear the biases you may start to block out, to talk to people honestly, and to trust them to draw their own opinions.  Listen to different kinds of news.  Realize that no candidate is perfect.  Speak with five year olds and clarify misconceptions.  Perhaps most of all, accept the results of your democracy and your surroundings gracefully.  By the time I put this on the internet, the American election will most likely be tallied and decided.  If you voted, you did the best you could.  It’s all we can really do, but it’s actually quite a lot.

Sorry if this ended up sounding like a soapbox.  My next entry will probably be about how I found hundreds of maggots in my bathroom on Halloween, so don’t worry, my life is still weird.  Here, I'll also add some unrelated photos.  Until next time!

Final installment: Abby and I carved a watermelon in honor of American pumpkins.  This one was named SKY PUMPKIN.  Notice it's various sky images.  Moons.  Stars. Clouds.  Lightning Bolts.  SKY PUMPKIN!  Also notice how trashy my candy necklace choker makes me look.  Yay.