Senegalese Wildlife

Wolof word of the day: "yaangi noos" is a greeting that means "are you having fun?". You are never actually supposed to respond with yes, because if you are having too much fun people will think you have money and try to steal it, so you can only respond that you are having a little fun, or I think you can also respond with something like "I'm eating my money".

I don't think I wrote about our mouse ("jinax" in Wolof) before, but in the first or second week of living with our family, Meera and I found a mouse in our room. We heard it scuttling around and neither really wanted to look for it, but Meera decided to turn the light on. There was a lot more angst and sleeplessness involved, but to make a long story short, the mouse jumped onto my bed and then onto the floor and Meera screamed bloody murder, after which our cousin Daniel came running into our room and asking why it was such a big deal and didn't we have mice in America? We named him Jacques, and unsuprisingly we didn't stop being teased for weeks. Since we haven't seen him in a while and have cleaned every inch of our room several times, we decided he had probably gone. Imagine my surprise, then, when I woke up this morning to have Meera tell me that she had seen a mouse on my bed with me last night while I was sleeping! Apparently Jacques is here to stay.

And now for the Senegalese culture lesson of the day: ataaya is the national tea of Senegal. The main point of it is not the tea itself, but the ritual of making it. You make it a really small pot that you put directly on hot coals, and there is one part sugar to about 3 parts water (but people in Senegal say that they don't like things "too sweet"). After the tea boils, you have to pour it back and forth between two cups in a special way that makes a lot of foam on top of the tea. The tea is no good without this foam. After you do that, you rinse the outside of the cups because they have sugar all over them, then you serve it. The ataaya glasses are only slightly bigger than shot glasses, and you're only supposed to use two, so two people drink at a time then you refill them and pass them on, with men being served first. The best part about this process is that it's usually men who make and drink the tea, so Meera and I get no end of amusement about Daniel and his friends having tea parties in his bedroom. They keep saying that they're going to teach us how to do it, and then we'll serve them, but as they are very particular about their tea, I think it will be a while before they entrust this task to us.