You know your in Senegal when…

Dont worry, I promise a legitimatish post soon. sorry its been so long. Really, it seems like so little gets done here, yet your always busy, even if being busy entails waiting for hours on end. Oh well, here ya go.


The closest thing you get to snow is hundreds of small white butterflies flying across the road
More of those butterflies use intersections to cross than people do
Every single meal takes a couple of hours to cook… and contains at least a liter of oil
You start to only care about mosquitoes being in your room. Crickets, salamanders, spiders, roaches, flies, and everything else seem to matter much less.
The crickets are black… and freaking massive. They also never die. Seriously, they are pretty much indestructible. Only a firm shoe, not a flip flop, can terminate them.
People invest in sheep and construction, not stocks.
Shop talk is of those sheep, not the local sports or politics.
The soap operas are way worse than anything you can imagine. Half of the 30 minute period is literally taken up by ‘shoom, shoom, shoom,’ close-ups. Search Vidaye
If done, giving to the poor must be done strategically. First, food is best, because you never know where the money goes. When giving leftovers, you must then make sure that they do not know where you live in order to avoid masses outside of your house. Note: this applies almost exclusively to toubabs.
It is still easier to find bilingual people than in America… even if the other language is only spoken in a couple square miles of the world.
Doing your laundry draws a crowd… and makes your hands raw
At the sight of food variety an ingrained instinct to scarf takes over. No, there is no hope, only the thought of whether the next cookie will make you throw up or pop. Either way, one eats the cookie.
Having the fashion sense of a teletubbie is prime. Monotone is in, and you can never forget to match your eye shadow/liner to your outfit. Now that would be a tragedy.
Things get steadily less gross… skinning chickens, skinning lambs….fat mothers breastfeeding in front of company….finding out that most people really aren’t fat. I have a tally of six slightly overweight men so far. Women do get bigger as they get older, but only to the point of fabulous jaiefunday.
Its funny that my goal in life is not: to have a jaiefunday, to get married around the age of 18, to find a Senegalese man, to find the most ways to get out of my work, and is not to win a gossip championship (which applies to about half of everyone).
When random strangers try to pay for everything you are doing (from buying fruit to taking the bus) because this is the country of Taranga, or hospitality. Exhibit A. On the way to Dakar I met a man who worked in the airport. We were talking, and while I was looking out the window, he paid for me without me noticing. After about twenty minutes of trying to pay him back, and him not letting me, I gave him my grapefruit, which was worth roughly the same amount, and he barely let me give him that.
People tend to adjust their clothes outside of a bathroom more often than inside of one.
Half of one shopping can be done from your car/bus window as you wait in traffic and vendors walk past with good either on their heads or hanging off of wires. I really think it would be easy to steal a banana off of one of the ladies heads as the bus drives off, hypothetically of course.
You make mashed potatoes… and then mash them with a fork.
You jump onto your public transport while it is still in motion, just as you leave your transport while it is still in motion