I forgot my camera while traveling, though, so, I am just going to ignore that whole time and instead do a quick photo narrative of possibly the most ridiculous night of my entire life. It was about two weeks ago, when Morgan (another volunteer who is a sarcastic and hilarious rugby player from Harvard, grew up in Alaska, and has a cat named Toubab), Jenny (also another volunteer who used to be a night security guard in DC who lived out of her car, carries around toads to scare people, and weightlifted regularly back home) and I met up in Jenny’s village for language training with Assane, our teacher from the training center.
Morgan journals on her computer, and recorded the experience right after it happened. So. I am going to tell it in her words along with my pictures, ie third person, with some additions and deletions on my part. Please try to enjoy how ridiculous it is that this is my life:
OMG we just had the funniest night experience ever. Dinner was the first part. They gave us millet and fish and also millet and milk. But Sarah and I dont like the normal milk (the tuberculosis milk) so we made powdered milk that tasted like coconut milk. It was awesome. (quote from Sarah: “DO YOU WANT SOME OF THIS MILK BEFORE IT ALL SOAKS IN?? JESUS” - she was mad cause I was taking too long to make the hole in my millet to pour the milk into. We laugh now, but at the time she was legit going to kill me. She didn’t even realize she said it, she’s just obsessed with food. Then assane mixed the milk with the millet and fish. It was disgusting. Here is a photo. You eat it with your hands by the way.
So then, as we are eating our instant milk powder and millet on the floor by headlamp and flashlight, a camel spider runs across the mat. I had never seen one before getting here...they are basically a spider and scorpion smooshed together, but are completely harmless. So naturally we all shrieked and I spilled milk all over the floor and we all leaped to the nearest elevated surface that we could find. (in doing so I obviously broke jennies cot), while assane grabbed the “fly swatter” which is actually a flip flop duct-taped to a stick, and nonchalantly killed the thing before going right back to eating the nar-nar fish millet milk. Here’s a picture of it:
This is what happened to the bowl after we all freaked out. My spoon fell in >: (
At this point Jennie left for unknown reasons, and Sarah and I resumed our eating of the millet and milk but we were afraid to sit on the floor cause of spiders so I felt the need to squat over the bowl while dribbling milk all over the place:
After this, I was going to take a picture of sarah over the bowl to show what we eat here. But, right as she leaned her head in to pose, jennie’s family came in. So I didnt take the picture. Sarah's head was in the bowl, so she had no idea they were all staring at her. I sat there trying to find the words in english to warn Sarah that there were people looking, but I couldn’t, so she sat there totally oblivious with her headlamp on and her face approx 1 inch above the millet while laughing hysterically for a good minute. I was whisper shouting the only words that came to mind, “peeeeoople, sarah, there are peeeoooople...” which she obviously did not pick up on. After a moment or so, Jenny’s family slowly backed their way out of the hut. Here is the photo that resulted:
So, that happened and then Jennie burst back into the room, bright red and bawling her eyes out. Her ENTIRE family followed her in, obviously bewhildered and trying to figure out WHAT was wrong, and why their toubab was crying. Apparently Jenny is afraid of camel spiders. They had no idea what was going on, though. Here they are:
In the midst of the chaos they were like “OMG why is jennie crying??” to which I accidentally responded, in broken Sereer, “Jenny Died...” thinking that they had asked what happened to the spider and unaware that they hadnt yet figured out the situation or the existence (or.. former existence) of said spider. Which caused further confusion. At which point I escaped to pee and returned to find Sarah sitting on the bed taking pictures and looking completely non-plussed by and oblivious to the approximately 10 senegalese people all trying to figure out why Jennie was crying. Mostly, Sarah was sad that they had put the lid back on the bowl. (they did put the lid back on the bowl. I was very unhappy about that).
Finally we managed to get rid of the senegalese people (after they kept trying to get jennie to put her shoes on. Like that was going to make it better. Or flipflops were going to keep the spider off her feet. Sigh) briefly. And we resumed eating. Until, in a burst of laughter over jenny crying, assane disappearing, my squatting over the bowl, and the whole situation, sarah snotted in the millet (yes. Booger. DRIPPED out of her nose. Disgusting. +1 for sarah) and we gave up trying to eat. Forgetting, of course, that someone will later be eating this snotty bowl of millet. Oops. Then some of jennies family came back to take the bowl and we topped off an evening of miscommunication with the following exchange:
Sarah: what was that running thing?
Jennies mom: [something that sounded like “horse scorpion” in seereer]
Sarah: what does it eat? [at least thats what we thought she said]
Jennie's mom: WHAT?? assane ATE it?? the spider??
Sarah: uhhh.. no.... ummmm....
And once again...they slowly backed their way out of the hut, but this time did not come back.
At this point we realized the cot was broken, so we broke out a hammer and all struggled to fix it. Fail:
And. That was language training. Here is Jenny with a frog:
I understand if you’re terrified, the rest of the village is too! : )
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