...and, I have no toilet paper.

My life in Senegal will be divided by this moment, I have decided, the continuity of gastrointestinal problems and how these effect your life profoundly and exponentially, punctuated by the moment, when I run out of toilet paper.

Yesterday, my life was puncuated by these two moments: pouring water from a plastic genie bottle desperately trying to get enough plunge force to get the cardboard center of my toilet paper role to go down the douche {duus}; and looking at my pock marked rashed face in a mirror over a sink in the sunlight of an outdoor bathroom, changing my shirt, and then sitting down to a fancy, and expensive, Senegalese lunch with meat.

I've granted myself an educational expedition, mostly because I needed to escape speaking Wolof where it matters for a while and spend some time visiting my own skin, having time for my own thoughts, reminicing about the things that I knew in my past life, where it didn't matter if I could take a basin of water off my head by myself without spilling it, or make the

(started again)
and, I have no toilet paper.

My life in Senegal will be divided by this moment. Continuity carried by the consistency of gastrointestinal problems, punctuated by this inevitable occurrence. Later to discuss the ultimate root, the racine, of gastrointestinal problems and the physical condition on happiness quotient. We pay too little attention, and this is the focus of my thesis.

Yesterday, my condition punctuated by these two moments: pouring water from a plastic genie bottle desperately trying to create enough plunge force to get the cardboard center of my toilet paper roll to go down the douche (duus); and catching a glimpse of my pock-marked rash-smeared face in the sunlit outdoor mirror above a sink, changing my shirt, and sitting down at a nice restaurant to eat ris blanc a la viande, Senegalese food that costs a lot of money but it has meat.

I have gifted myself this educational expedition, but mostly because I need a break from speaking Wolof that matters, and need to spend some time in my own skin, to remember my previous life, where things like "gay travel" and moms kissing babies in aqua pools in Hilton Head were something the mind could conceive. Not now where I can’t lift a basin of water off my head to the ground without help, I can’t make the pit-pit when I wash clothes.
I went to Jata Faka, "dead lion" in Mandinka, though its not a Mandinka village, and a fellow Mandinka volunteer didn’t recognize it. Ken kindly told me as I set off on the sand path by myself, all the animals that matter are dead. Except hyenas.
And so I set off, one foot in front of the other, literally, in the pitch-can’t see my hand in front of my face-black for real, at 5:00 am, village time, on the sand "way" from Jata Faka to I-forget-the-name, to catch the only car that might be running today on account of the rains. But I get there, an hour later, and its not running, the driver will later, unbeknownst to me, be my accomplice on another treacherous but daylight travel. Yes, my physical knowledge will revisit me later as I sit, exhausted, bubbles running in my stomach, soaked and bleeding mud dye all over my bleach-washed Espirit tank top, watching this modest driver, thin with a goiter above his left eye (I now have one in my armpit) man handle the non-power steering 19-who knows what or how many times refurbished Mercedes minibus over these flooded sand roads. Flooded sand roads? How do you walk/drive in these? I don’t know, just another daily miracle I witness here where, in the words of Barbara Kingsolver, everything goes through the greater digestive system of Africa. Cows. Now it is changing, we are on the line, but cows are eating bundled sticks out of market store fronts to survive. And not even that. Mummified corpses riddle the open fields.
My sandal broke about 10 steps into my solo journey. I took the other one off and continued to walk, pulling my feet out of the sucking mud. The scary part was the river. I heard it first. In a land which the day before had been endless indistinguishable blinding lifeless sand there was now a furious waist-deep quick currant river flowing, and I with no shoes and my dead portable in my rice sack and I can’t see my hand in front of my face. One defining characteristic of Senegal for me, the lack of laws, compounded, expounded (exponentially?) increased by who-knows, -none (sounds in this house, tales of ghosts but I am unfazed, the power goes out midsentence so I can hear the mosquito buzz in my ear, I lay on the cold floor and drink my refrigerated boxed wine) (file, save) in the States anyone must tell me I am stupid for taking this next step, but here, who will know if I am swept by this river. Hyenas? You hear them, muuyum, muuyum, and all the dogs howl. Snakes, one bite and they rey nit, and all I can do is put one invisible foot in front of the other. I sing songs of everyone I know, of Jen in Long Island with her new boyfriend on the beach, its 1 am where she is, of Jenny’s new baby, Maymuna? (too much time in Senegal), of my friends, Sue and Tara and Reb and Mon and Anne, of Reb and her mom and Boston, of going to Holyoake and Lake Winnapesaukee (Ken has spend significant time in both of these capstone places).
When I get to the village I have stopped singing because light has just arrived, a pale bluish-purplish light and the first thing I notice in the village besides the rain dripping off the grass sheltered areas is the muffled sound of millet pounding, a sound I have previously only heard from the luxury of my own bed, waking me up at 5, sometimes 6 am, my gentle alarm, where I can also notice the lack of kids laughter and fighting, and go back to sleep. I am tired and wet, and walk zombie-esque to where I see a lot of broken down cars. Which one of these pieces of shit works? Going to a what looks like car cemetery in Senegal is really going to a mechanic lot, only a matter of time before these crashed and rusting rotting listing tireless heaps of clay-like metal will be getting fixed roadside again, while its 30 odd passengers wait in the sun. No one seems to be up so I mummify towards the sound of millet pounding in the rain. The women are less than shocked, can you imagine? A soaked toubab arrives at the break of dawn asking for a car? They make their best cohorted effort not to laugh, wake up probably their husband, who tells me no cars will come today, on account of the rain.
Out of courtesy, or, I would like to hope that she has the wherewithal and the self-thought to think that she can escape her morning drudgery, the taller, more assertive woman leads me to the burrom oto’s house to ask him if he will be running today. He won’t. I find myself noticing that she has a nice pair of spongy orange sandals as I walk barefoot behind her. She takes me to the boutique (or is it the mosque, it is brightly painted with faces of who knows who marabouts) where I can sit in the shade of the grass and wait for a car or a charette. She knows there is none coming but she also sees in my eyes and my stance that I am American and I am determined. Before she goes she also advises me to go home and wait for tomorrow, because for her tomorrow is the same as today, she will again be pounding millet, and the next day, if the roads haven’t dried and God forbid it rains again, how long will I wait at "home"? But I have these things to type. And so I go sit in a huffy in the dirt beneath the grass and dig in my rice sack for my plastic bag of tamarinds, the only food I have, and my tapeworms/amoebas and my frustration have made me hungry. Plus, I don’t know what else to do but eat them. Sit here alone with my American frustration/annoyance/poutiness/determination? These things are unknown to Senegalese. And the tall woman wont eat until after she finishes pounding and sweeps her family’s compound and cleans her room of dust and wakes her kids and bathes them in a bucket and makes the breakfast, and then, maybe, if there is enough and she is in the mood, she will take a few handfuls of her hardly-pounded sand like millet couscous. Cere. Or in Sereer, psyche.
Once I have eaten enough to make the bitter segment of my tongue go numb, I decide to repair my shoe. What else can I do? Its 7:30 and a car’s not coming, and I sure as heck don’t want to walk back to Ken’s village. And this is a moment where I become truly Senegalese; I survey my surroundings: some hay, a couple of thin sticks, and a thicker plastic one. I start with one of the thin sticks and loop it through the hole where the thong has broken, but in the wrapping and twisting the stick breaks, and so I have to leave the shelter and venture out into the rain where I find the most common Senegalese tool, the morsou, sounds like morsel, and that’s what it is, any shape or width or size of fabric scrap, when your clothes are finally wrecked don’t despair, you can throw it over your back fence and someone else will shred it up and use it to hold their millet stalk fences together, to make a coiled pillow to put on their head to rest the heavy water basins, to wrap up a wound. I find mine attached weakly to a fallen stick fence, it is blue and thin and perfect, and I weave it through the hole in my shoe and around the plastic thong part, and am flooded with joy just in time to meet an old toothy man who rounds the corner and displays another Senegalese trait: the eternal optimist. Even though it is entirely obvious that at maybe 8:00 no car is ever going to come through town this late, he tells me with an honest grin, dinaa new, it will come. And so God sets me up to create the mental miracle (mirage?) of what is to come next, that is, a man cleanly clad (in this rain?) in a pale green boubou with an umbrella (?), he is the owner of the car that will not run, (and the car that was not there in his lot, he left it in Kaffrine on account of the rain), but he is going to the next village to catch the only car in these parts, thankfully it will wait for him since, as drivers, they know each other, and thankfully for me, the idea I’ve been trying to express (Is there going to be a car, for sure, in any other village within human possibility of walking, because if so, I will go, get me out of this God forsaken place to an internet café!) is already in his determined eyes. I know he is going somewhere and I latch on to him like Jesus. Madame and Madmoiselle. And off we go. He is walking too fast and I am already too tired and so with my cloth strapped shoe I flap along and can only steal glances of the rising sun and the thunderstorms off in the distance and the grass, and millet, and corn, that have sprung from the earth, when, yesterday? Now there are a few toads that sing ahead of us in the puddles but by the time we get to the car there are literally hundreds, and the day before there were chameleons and kids, and everyone running in the rain topless and swimming in the shin-high water. This land has come alive and you can see its topography now defined by graded fields, here it comes and there it goes, where as two days ago it was all one blinding mass of white sand. Everything waiting to spring alive! With the force of one day. We have waited here in the nothingness.
I arrived in Ken’s village possibly as a goddess. Wearing my deep blue boubou (because Fary, my counterpart forced me, I didn’t know if there was going to be a marabout in that village) with the tidalwave pattern on it, I arrived at the exact time of the rain. Don’t go fast, they said, you have brought us luck. The first rain that they wait for from the time the last rain comes. We planted over a hundred trees the next day in the soft earth, mangoes and cashews and a bunch of thin spindly hard-weather plants to line the fields, a live-fence, it is called, trees to beautify and keep out the ravenous animals, and its best of all free. But it takes a lot of work and we popped an ibprofen with some toubab crackers (delicious) before we went out again in the afternoon.
I am late, which is a pattern, and I will only have five days before I go back to Thies for 3 weeks to hopefully learn. But I am learning by my frequent texts "Waxoon naa tey dinaa new wante suba dinaa new inshallah. Ba suba ak jamm." But that is because travel in Senegal is hard and unpredictable. Left a totally nos baptism in Kaolack with my counterpart, with drumming and huge speaker music and vermicelli (thin spagetti) with yapp (meat), which we got to eat twice because we were VIP’s (I am a permanent one and always get the best of everything, and so all I write and think and say is bullshit because the hunger in my belly, if it ever exists, is never for more than one meal.) Went to Kaffrine to catch a car, got there at 11:00 and didn’t leave until 6:00. No problem for a toubab, exponentially people will adopt you and the first family I saw when I got off the back of the moto-transport invited me to yendoo (spend the day/eat lunch) at their house. I chose to go to the market, find a big piece of bread, and buy 1000CFA worth of meat, which I hadn’t eaten in maybe 3 weeks, and felt like a criminal. After I sat and waited and refused, for the remaining time, various marriages. Also included in this time was a trip across the street to splatter some random family’s douche with diarrhea. Oh yes, just called med today and I might have had/still have ghiardia since I got to Senegal. But no big deal, hence I have left it for last, and first: the physical condition. I am American and Senegalese.
I mean to include this part for an essential aspect of Senegalese culture, and the benefit of being a toubab, to make up for future times where I might complain about its ultimate suckiness, and also the motivation of this trip. Marriage proposals, kids encircling you screaming "Toubab, toubab!" and trying to get you to dance so they can laugh at you, everyone basically laughing at you all the time and asking you why you can’t do stuff, why you don’t speak Sereer/Pulaar/Bambara, people schmoozing you in French, even when you say you don’t understand French and please speak to me in Wolof, it’s the schmoozing that they want and Wolof and their "How are you?", "I am fine." British English doesn’t allow for this. "Yaangi nos? Ana sa xaalis? Maay ma ko. Bugg naa lekk ko." Are you having fun? Where is your money? Give it to me. I want to eat it. They ask you as they look you over up and down. Sucks to be you if you’re not bone thin and they know you’ve been eating your money’s worth of bread and mangoes and coffee and spaghetti and ice cream. If they only knew. There are the Senegalese like Adama who prey to be fat and steal the bread out of their own kids’ mouths. But they literally don’t have their own two cents worth.
But its hot and 11 am and I am tired and everyone wants me to come eat at their house because they want to ask me these questions. They want to harass me because I should be harassed and because they don’t know anything else…STOP! Don’t pity. It is us it is us who portrays our image around the world of drinking cokes and wearing nice clothes and driving big shiny cars. We educate them on what makes life grand. And so hanging out on the street making toys out of wires and laughing and beating the shit out of your 100 neighbor playmates means nothing compared with money money money and stuff stuff stuff. Yet my mom is lonely for lack of friends.
And it even means that when the bus finally pulls in to Kaffrine I step off into a warmer and more honest and totally un-self conscious greeting from my day’s-made friends, and have time to stumble into the same bathroom to relieve my bowels, only to be irritated by this open-eyed woman asking me sincerely why I won’t wait for lunch, wait for tea, wait for dinner, toog, waxtaane, sit and talk, for the day, for the week, for whatever, all they want from the toubab with the mission to save the world is to sit with them and talk, so perhaps beyond all the awkward offensive mismatches of culture, sometime under the stars and the moon when the day grows dark and the electricity is cut or doesn’t exist, we can reach a common ground. And then my spine shivers up and down with excitement, with happiness. I hope they feel the same thing. But to express these concepts is not yet in my Wolof vocabulary. And so I look up at the stars (do they see them/appreciate them?) and perhaps lay down, letting all of my muscles go, to show them that now, ahh, I am comfortable. Maybe I’ll even throw in a sentence about my life back at home, to show them that I am feeling in my own skin, which will be lost in the air somewhere above their heads, where the whole world exists that they have never seen. Its ok. We’re all laying here on the mat. But sometimes I need to come and stare at the screen burning its white empty image, and me, in letter’s form, on the computer.
When I ran out of water and the cardboard roll still clung to the sides of the douche, I heard the oto’s horn beeping, he was waiting for me, I rushed my thanks and silently apologized for leaving this alien mess for them to clean up. The remaining bus ride was a blur of exhausted grateful sleep and a dirty bottom, wake up to arrive back in the city, Kaolack, stumble soaked and dirtier than any of these Kaolackois to the nearest episserie (French toubab store) to buy toilet paper and ask for the bathroom, a good scene for any horror movie in America. But I am happy as a button. (My English is waning.) After taking care of this primary need I wander stunned down the busy road, people calling out for me to buy buy buy, take a scooter ride, come and talk to them, marry them, one guy sees my dye-stained white Espirit tank top and exclaims Li lan la? Mballit!?! "What is this? Trash?!?" I don’t know if he is making fun of me for being unpresentable, or if, seeing my mud colored stained clothes, he thinks I may have fallen into or been splashed by any of the newly created sewage trash puddles that will ransack Kaolack now that the rainy season has come. Cesspool on the Hill, kindly referred to by volunteers. With no sewage or trash systems, the cities suffer while the villages prosper in the rainy season. A thing I would not know if I didn’t spend the year. Maybe the second year I will get an idea of what to do, since the first year will doubtlessly be spent figuring out how to get across the haplessly laid crumbled bricks that allow you to cross the sewage without getting leprosy.
I finally arrive at my destination, a fancy restaurant, magically tucked off to the side of the violent street, where French people wear nice clothes and are "fat" (their cheekbones concealed) but wear wrinkles of preoccupation. I can order a beer and sit in peace and read my travel edition of Newsweek. But only after making a trip to the bathroom, where I see my face for the first time in weeks, torn by the elements, but with eyes that scare me for how they have changed, and I change my dirty shirt, my cow-cow villageois skin to try to take some time to be American and eat with a fork.