Senegalese Sunday

Each of us complains when it is our turn to carry the rapidly melting yellow cake we were bringing to lunch at Aran’s house. Aran is a Senegalese woman in her 30’s that sells cheb au jin, rice with fish, a Senegalese dish in Sucurpira, the central market in Praia. After months of sitting on crowded benches in the sweltering afternoon heat in the middle of the market eating hearty plates of red rice and chicken or fish, Aran has become a friend. About two weeks ago, Lisa and I were at my house relishing the last lazy Sunday we would spend in my house in Cape Verde. Lisa was talking on her cell phone on the roof (the best place to get reception in my house) when she saw Aran and the younger girl that sells bissap, hibiscus leaf juice with her. Lisa excitedly called to them, and I went outside to see who she was shouting to.

I insisted they “txchiga,” come inside my house to visit and have something to eat. I made mint tea with heaping spoon-fulls of sugar, my attempt to recreate the traditional three cups of sweet green tea that are served in Senegal (the first cup you are strangers, the second friends, and by the friend family). I had no food in my house, as usual, so we made popcorn. Aran and the younger girl relaxed on my bed and tried on my clothes, happily taking several items with them. They made Lisa and I promise that Sunday afternoon we would come have lunch at their house. We quickly agreed as we love Senegalese food-in particular yassa, a spicy dish full of onions served with chicken or fish that most Cape Verdean places do not serve because it is too spicy for local taste preferences.

From that first day I sat down for a huge plate of cheb au jin, red rice and fish, I could feel that Aran’s gentle and kind nature. It is something that cannot be explained; it’s something you feel. This was despite our language and cultural barriers. Lisa and I have both experienced this meeting people in Cape Verde. It is an indefinable phenomenon. I think I usually feel it when a person has sympathetic eyes, an understanding voice, or a calm presence of being (as Cape Verdeans tend to be a bit more high-strung and vocal than most Americans are accustomed to).

I also feel a tug on my heart-strings, compassion for people who come to Cape Verde from West African countries. They leave husbands, children, lovers, friends, everything behind for the chance of a better life in Cape Verde. Most end up walking all day every day from town to town, up and down the iconic mountains and valleys of Santiago Island, selling hygiene products, dresses, and cheap jewelry out of backpacks or plastic carriers. It is unfathomable to me to imagine this as my job, a career, an indefinite way of living. They have left abject poverty to try in attempt to make a better life in a country that we as Americans classify as under-developed. Poverty is relative. I have met Africans who were employed at embassies, who were teachers, engineers, and doctors in their countries and after coup d’état, civil war, general unrest moved to Cape Verde where they only way they found to earn any money is to walk from morning to evening trying to sell toothpaste and cockroach poison.

There is also an immediate bond, a togetherness created out of being dissimilar. I am a foreigner you are a foreigner. We are both outsiders here. While we came to this new country for radically different reasons, we both know it is like to leave things behind, to miss people constantly, and to not know how to feel given this new opportunity.

Back to the melting cake, which is suffering horribly. It is 11 A.M. Sunday morning the humidity and the sun are fiercely competing to out-do the other. The parched grounds beg for rain, nearly everyone has planted their crops for this year’s rain; now all there is to do is to wait for the rain to make up her fickle mind. Jon, Lisa, and I walk around a neighborhood that we were not familiar with, asking people in the street if they knew where Aran’s house was. We marvel how a year ago we would never feel comfortable enough to do this, to walk through a strange neighborhood in the city in an attempt to find someone, and now it seems routine that we stumble through series of houses, broken cobblestones, women washing clothes outside, babies with no clothes on.

We find Aran’s house eventually, after a few phone calls and a series of misleading information. An old dark and musty house made-up of several rooms rented out to people. Aran begins the preparations for lunch while her goddaughter Aranzinha (translates to little Aran) shows us photos of friends and family in Senegal. The house had no stove so she cooks directly over a gas container, like a camping stove, in a tiny corner area of the house, the stone walls blackened with grease. She sautés a huge vat of onions mixed with hot pepper, black pepper, lime, and Maggi cubes (a bouillon cube popular in Senegal). Lisa and I cut up fresh fruit: mango, apple, papaya, and banana and mixed it in a large bowl with natural yogurt, sugar, and condensed milk. We eat lunch barefoot on the floor in her completely airless, humid bedroom. On the floor eating are Jon, Lisa, and I, Aran, the younger girl that sells bissap, hibiscus flower juice at the market, another skinny Senegalese woman, Aranizha, a Cape Verdean man “H” in his 20’s who rents another room in the house, and Aran’s ex-husband . Jon, Lisa, and I try to copy Aran and the Senegalese women and eat with our right hand, causing them to laugh at us.

After the spicy yassa we eat the decadent fruit salad. I was so very full and with the room so warm I felt sleepy, like a baby. Aran demanded that Lisa and I lay on her bed. Her Cape Verdean roommate, H, and Jon sat across from the three of us. It is hard to describe how enjoyable the simple conversations we had were, because what made them so enjoyable was that they were indistinctive from conversations you might have with a group of friends in America. Aran told us about her divorce, missing her children, her views on family. We talked about Lisa’s relationship with her boyfriend in America, if they will marry or not, how she will first go to school and have her own career. I explained why I was not married or dating anyone and my philosophy that it is not necessary to search for love and better if it finds you. H spoke English decently after studying it in high school for only two years. He told us that he is an orphan who has put himself through college and is now looking for a Master’s program. It was a reminder how easy life is for us in America, with all our choices and possibilities for life, school, work.

It was refreshing to spend the afternoon with Aran and H who both have cultivated unique mentalities as compared with others in similar socioeconomic and cultural situations. At some point during the conversation I drifted off to sleep. With the warmness of the room and how secure I felt in that place, I was lulled to sleep by this exchange of ideas and tolerance among unlikely friends with backgrounds so different from one another. The heat and unlikeliness of the afternoon made it difficult to distinguish between dreaming and waking.

Aran made Moroccan couscous served with condensed milk, sugar, and natural yogurt. It tasted like rice pudding and even though each of us was full, we all ate. Everyone joked about getting fatter, the Senegalese women telling Lisa and I it would make us more rafantya, beautiful in Woloof, one of the principal dialects in Senegal. Aran gave Lisa an ornate traditional Senegalese outfit. Jon joked that Lisa’s breast would fall out of the armhole when she waved “Txchau!” so Aran put on the outfit and demonstrated that it wouldn’t happen. Jon, Lisa, and I were surprised that she would do this and in my mind it solidified that we were all friends.

After being in that small windowless bedroom in the back that old house for about 7 hours, we realized how late it was and that we had to leave. Aran pleaded with us to stay the night at her place but we refused. She walked us to a taxi where we went back to Jon’s to take much needed cold showers. The three of us chatted excitedly about how much we had enjoyed the day. Frequently as a Peace Corps Volunteer you find yourself forced to spend a long hot day in relentless heat with no shade at some party, event, activity where you find yourself an outsider, not interacting with anyone yet it’s socially unacceptable for you to leave or perhaps your house is too far away. For the entire 7 hours we were at Aran’s house I never felt that. A PCV who came from Senegal spoke about how astonishing truly warm Senegalese hospitality can be…and I believe I definitely felt what he was talking about. It was somehow different than the Cape Verdean morabeza, hospitality and friendship that I have experienced here. Perhaps it has something to do with that bond of foreigners, this bond created on the fact we are different from most other people here.