Feeling into the Joys of West Africa

A journal of my first days in Senegal

It is enough, just to be alive, on this fresh morning, in this broken world. - Mary Oliver

Feb. 17, 2025 - Cite Aliou Sow, Senegal

On my first morning in Senegal, I am up long before the call to prayer breaks through the heavy silence, the male voice echoing and reverberating through the air in its repetitive rhythms, well before the rooster crows out in response, in seeming parody.

The patter of slippers on the tiled stairs, the rush of water from the spiggot as it flows into the bucket. Someone is awake, preparing for the day.

There are many people sleeping in this house, men, women and children whose names I was too embarrassed to ask and ask again to determine. The sounds are unfamiliar and so the ear has to make sense of something new, or more so really the brain. And there is a resistance there, an unconscious set of the jaw and shoulders in an attempt to maintain some semblance of Self amidst Other.

Today. Today I will ask again for names, and yesterday’s teachings might help me actually learn them. I will write them down. I will commit them to memory, practicing and repeating their rhythms like I did with the djembe, with my teacher Samba, at the beach, my white hands turning pink from the continued slapping of skin against the skin of the drum.

As the call to prayer rises again, layered like many overlapping mountain ranges in its distant diffused tones, I am overwhelmed.

To be foreign is to feel strange and ignorant, and it is hard to get over the shame of that enough to truly embrace where I am and who I’m with and not disappear entirely in denial of challenging differences.

I have too many questions to ask my host, Magueye Sy, and I have already been spoken to about being in a rush, about worrying.

“You are on vacation, Stephanie,” he says, hands suggesting I take it down a notch, lowering the neurotic New Yorker vibe a bit in order to enjoy Senegal. “There is time.”

There is time.

Is there?

My heart hurts. A sudden tragic death has created an even harsher context for this dream trip to Senegal then I’d supposed. And the idea surges again and again as I take in everything, with all of my senses.

We’re doing it wrong.

The rhythms in America are all off. We grapple and grasp, like the wrestlers Magueye shows me a video of, men who performed last night near his house to huge crowds in the stadium we passed on the way from the airport. It is a metaphor surely, the wrestling, as Africa struggles to develop in its own way, in its own vibe, not the way others tried to force them to be in the not-so-distant past, still.

How does one try to help but not unwittingly foist upon others fairly evil principles and practices that have become so commonplace as to seem natural?

Simplicity has become so complex in America, a practice that now comes at great expense, that people who can afford to hire high-priced teams to implement. But here, it comes naturally.

There is a strange flow to the way even cars come near one another, a dance they do, tooting a light horn in friendly warning rather than rebuke. There are wheeled carts pulled by prancing horses bearing bright-colored blinders that meander through the mopeds seemlessly without traffic lights or stop signs.

Here, there is an awareness of the preciousness of things and I am aware as I write that that recognition in itself is a privileged impression as that preciousness is, for the locals, something they take for granted. It is not a discipline to appreciate and pay for, it is a necessity, a skill to survive.

“We have very little but what we do have, we share,” Magueye says, again, repeating the message he gave me over the phone, when I’d found him through a French agency called Vaolo that links tourists to locals without taking a fee, calling itself “a collaborative platform for travelers concerned about their impact.”

I am deeply concerned about my impact. I want it to be positive, for both parties. “Win win,” Magueye agrees.

In the tiled back courtyard of the Sy’s family home, in an area just outside the city center called Cite Aliou Sow, I watched hours after my arrival as Magueye’s wife, Absa, her littlest child tied to her back with a scarf knotted securely in the front, bends to grind the long wooden pestle against the bottom of the large wooden mortar.

The spice she names is unfamiliar, and I’m not able to understand what’s in the mix she is now scooping out with her hands and stuffing into the pieces of raw chicken in the large metal bowl that she kneels down to reach on the ground. It seems like paprika, and a bit of cayenne maybe? She massages the spice mixture into the flesh and the fragrant smell makes me hungry.

I remember this the next morning as the birds begin to chirp just after 7, when the sun begins to rise again in the sky. I pause in my reflections. I want to meditate in the way I have learned, to use my mala beads to recite a Sanskrit thank you to the elements: Om Namah Shivaya. I will murmur it and let it vibrate amidst the call to prayer and the rooster’s crow.

I can feel in my body the joyous vibration of family life here, how the babies’ self-soothing pre-verbal moans mix in with the bleating of neighbors’ sheeps and the sound of spoons against the various metal bowls used to mix and serve, of water running, of mopeds and the singing of children.

There is a call and response, expected and required, a repeating underlying rhythm I can feel.

I wake up feeling silly. I am unsure of what to do, how to act in this place. I want to be kind and generous but there are cultural differences I do not understand, yet. I brought a slew of I ❤️ New York gifts gathered at the airport gift shop for Magueye’s six children, little coin purses and pens and chocolates, a mug and a little teddy bear.

I see now how different life is here, how extraneous stuff seems to be far less a thing, how there is little disposable paper, no toilet paper or napkins or paper towels. There are disposable paper coffee cups at the little stands along the road where Nescafe and water are hand frothed by pouring the liquid at a distance back and forth between one cup and then the other, in a transfixing rhythm. But mostly there is appreciation for using and re-using things, picking bits of food up off the ground if dropped. But there is also a great willingness to share.

When lunch was ready, I’d been invited to sit around a small table where the large bowl was placed.

There were 13 of us gathered on low stools and chairs, women and children who eat separately from the men. Absa handed me a spoon, and I paused, watching how others did it, before digging in. She suggested I pull in closer. I watched and saw them dip their spoons in by the edge, use the side of the bowl where there was just rice, and bring a small amount of the rice to their mouth. The dish, Yassin told me (Magueye’s teenage daughter who speaks English) is Yassa Ganar, Senegalese Braised Chicken with Caramelized Onions.

I gently leaned in to dip my spoon, first just with rice, then bolder to take some caramelized onions. I am careful to eat slowly though at home I eat fast and greedily. Someone cuts up some chicken with their spoon and pushes it toward me. Wordlessly, I take it. Heavenly.

I can’t explain how beautiful this is, to share this delicious food with strangers in their home, unable to communicate except for simple words I know like “Merci,” and “C’est bon!” and in smiles. I play little games with the children, who look at me with some fear at first, especially the younger ones for whom my white skin is totally strange. I slap them five and show them little pattycake games. And we bridge the gap somehow, wordlessly.

Yassin, who is studying chemistry in school, the only one in her family besides her father who speaks English, took me to try to find a pharmacy, through the sandy streets, horses pulling men sitting high on wheeled carts filled with building supplies and foodstuffs. A man walked holding a sewing machine on his shoulder and loudly swishing a pair of scissors to advertise his services. It is Sunday, and the pharmacies we find are closed, but the walk has been illuminating.

It is in Yassin’s room that I am sleeping I realized only later, when she announced herself with a “Bonjour” and came slowly through the curtained doorway to get her clothes and books for school the next day and to bring me a tray with a millet porridge and a can of evaporated milk to go with it, for dinner. I sleep.

Feb. 18, Cite Aliou Snow/Cambarene

Djembe lessons this morning with Samba. We play for two hours, mostly repeating and repeating and repeating. There is a small blood blister on my right hand when we leave the beach.

Afterward, we drop off the djembes at his home and Samba walks me back to Magueye’s through his neighborhood, Cambarene, stopping to say hello to friends and neighbors, gesturing toward me and speaking in French. Awkwardly I say bonjour. Some try to practice their little bit of English. “Hello? How are you?” And I try too. “Ce va? Bien.” Gulp. He has bought me a little coffee and I tried to pay, taking out a bill that was way too much, and he waved me off. I have yet to deal with the West African franc, the CFA, but I know I’ll have to learn. When I want to look around at a community garden, he pays a tip to the disabled young man who works there. I have paid him for the lessons and yet I make a note to give him extra for this money he has spent.

We gather again for lunch that Absa has prepared, around 3 pm as is customary here. Today it is the special Senegalese traditional dish Thieboudienne, with fish. Wow. The flavors are so delicate, especially as one dips the spoon in gently and intermittently so as to savor. Today I try adding some juice from the lime that is cut in half and passed around, doing as they do, squeezing a bit into my spoon and then dipping into the rice. I am learning.

After lunch, Magueye takes me in a taxi to Lac Rose, or the Pink Lake, although the guide in the little wooden boat explains the many reasons why it’s not so pink, in fact not at all pink. Too much salt, too much water coming in from the ocean. He sells me sand art magnets (that I don’t really want) and we escape the hard-sell lady vendor with the basket of stuff on her head to get me to buy that I don’t want, and we are on our way. Magueye apologizes but the drive through the area to the tortoise refuge past so many markets and towns makes up for the disappointment in not seeing a pink lake.

At Le Village Des Tortue there are beautiful Baobab trees and other kinds of trees and vegetation and we learn fascinating things, like how the temperature affects whether tortoises give birth to males or females. I catch some not all of the facts of the place since the guide speaks French. Some signs are in English and Magueye translates some.

I sleep well, for almost 12 hours.

Feb. 19, Cite Aliou Snow/Cambarene/Dakar

I take a morning lesson with Samba. On this third day, Magueye and Samba have clearly learned to trust me because instead of walking all around across a faraway bridge to the beach, we play frogger across the crowded highway. I laugh at the adventure and appreciate that I seem to have passed some sort of litmus test.

I think I’ve gotten a bit better at the djembe in my few days here, but maybe not. The rhythms are hard to keep straight. I love watching Samba play, how his hands fly in a way I can only hope mine might someday (but probably won’t.)

We play for two hours, and then Magueye puts me in a taxi for my hotel in Dakar. I am staying in Almadies, a bit randomly as it is when looking for a hotel in a city you’ve never visited. I did my research, of course. The hotel seemed nice, reviews were good, and I heard good things about the neighborhood.

Magueye tells me it is the richest area in Dakar and that the U.S. Embassy has recently moved there. He offers to take me in the taxi but I say I’m fine, and then stop paying attention to my Google maps, choosing to look around instead, and am left off a 10-minute walk from my hotel. It is funny that I will get used to this walk and do it every day but on this first day, it feels strange and I am trying in vain to roll my suitcase along the sandy sidewalk, blocked intermittently with cars and things, taxis honking to ask me if I need a ride but I am determined. It is only a few minutes away and even though I stand out here and feel a bit strange all goes well.

I have toilet paper in my hotel, and a flushing toilet, and a hot shower, and I appreciate these things anew, realizing they are luxuries in this country, and also am newly aware of what a waste it is, all that disposable paper.

I walk along the beach and find the first restaurant. It is a touristy spot, expensive, and not nearly as good as Absa’s food and at nearly New York prices. Still delicious, local fish. I am just a half an hour away and it seems like a different world, more of a mix between the old culture of Senegal and new upscale developments, like overpriced espresso drinks, and cocktails, which being a predominantly Muslim country, many Senegalese don’t indulge in.

I wander afterward along the oceanfront road, popping my head into surf schools where dogs lie happily in the warm air. I excitedly enter a shop filled with the most beautiful African jewelry and sculpture and masks. The gentleman sits me down to negotiate what price I will pay for the items I admire, and I hate this but know it’s what has to happen here. I would pay much more for these things in America but I am here, in Senegal, and so I offer more than what they would charge a local but not so much that I feel gouged. It is a dance. “Win win,” Magueye and I agreed.

I stop in to another spot for a coffee at the beach, and suddenly below me on the rocks comes the most exquisite music. I think it is a Kora that is being played (that I am soon to learn, gulp), but I later learn that it is the Ngoni.

And then there are other instruments, including one that looks like an oversized Kalimba. And when the musicians come around into the restaurant to serenade me, the sun setting behind them over the Atlantic, one of the guys - Alpha, I later learn - tells me he can sell me a smaller version of this unknown cool instrument, and teach me. Oui, I say, yes!

We arrange the amount and even though my phone is dead and it is dark, I am determined. I leave to find a cash machine and manage to ask people - “Banc?” - and find the dark door manned by a security guard, who I ask to borrow his phone to figure the correlating numbers of my pin. I giggle excitedly at this happy turn of events, and return to pay my new friends for an instrument. I sit with them at their friend’s coffee stand, just aside the tennis courts and across from the school, on the main road, where people pop in and out, stopping after work to get a coffee, while I practice the instrument I’ve never laid eyes on that they call the Bongo, or Bongoma.

These men are from Guinea, I learn, not Senegal, Aliya on the Ngoni, Alpha on the Bongoma, and Traore, who plays the Bolombata. They ask me to share in the dinner the cafe stand owner Mamadou, also from Guinea, has somehow somewhere prepared.

As we gather around the bowl with spoons to eat the hot delicious rice together after jamming, I feel grateful that I have some experience in this, in the generosity of these West Africans and in their traditions.

As I walk back to my hotel, still wearing a sunhat, a weird giggling white woman meandering down sandy back alleyways filled with embassies and upscale residences, a driver in uniform sees me and offers me a ride. Pausing for just a moment, I go with my gut and gratefully accept. He is lovely, and in the short ride offers me a valuable lesson, teaching me in the local language of Woloff how to say thank you: Jerejef. Jerejef, jerejef, jerejef. So grateful for the kindness of strangers and to be learning some new rhythms…

More tomorrow…It took me a few days to absorb all this and take the time to sit down and write. Thanks for tuning in to my adventures in Senegal!! As they say here, “Jamm rekk,” peace only.

In peace + harmony,

Steph