Mendy family matters

First in a series of posts about everyday life in Dakar.

Tomorrow is the last day of the August presession, and fall semester orientation starts on Monday, meaning we have four days off to spend as we please.  So three friends and I are taking a 7-place bush taxi down to The Gambia, which, for the geographically handicapped, is the tiny country that lies entirely within Senegal except for its west coast.  I hear that it’s pretty striking in terms of natural beauty, but I can report further when I come back.  So since I’ll be away for a few days, I figured I would start my “series” about what things are actually like here in Dakar because I’ve said almost nothing about that to this point.

Before that, though, a couple updates.  I successfully navigated my first Senegalese haircut this past weekend; pictures of the process and the end result are up on my picture site (http://picasaweb.google.com/eblazarus/), since my host kids took my camera and took 300 pictures of various things, including my haircut.  I guess that’s my only update.

Anyway, as you can guess from the title, I’d like to use this post to introduce my host family to the world (or at least the 47 people who subscribe to get my updates, plus the few other various people who accidentally navigate to this site).  I live with the Mendy family in a neighborhood called SICAP Baobab (I’ll elaborate on the neighborhood in a later post).  It’s a large family run mostly by the strong women that compose it, and it’s been great to get to know them so far.  Problem is, I don’t know them that well yet; a lot of the time they’re just speaking to each other in Wolof, and I’m also quite shy to ask questions about what people do with their lives given that, as I said a week or so ago, no one really asks those questions of me.  So I’ll do my best here.

The head of the family is a woman of about 75, whom we call Mère Vitou.  Mère Vitou is a retired veteran of the fashion industry, although I’m not sure in what capacity she worked in couture.  She has diabetes and high blood pressure, but that doesn’t stop her from having a pretty great sense of humor, as is evident in this picture that one of my host kids took:

She’s also quite stoic, though; every morning, I eat breakfast with the flies on our back patio while Mère Vitou sits in a chair outside considering life, I suppose.  She likes watching tv, and loves making fun of her grandkids.

Mère Vitou is married to a man referred to as Pa Mendy, who remains largely a shadow figure to me.  He’s also supposedly retired, and I hear that he worked in the Ministry of Finance, but he’s gone almost all day, every day and doesn’t seem to say anything to anyone.  So if there are any ladies into mysterious (old) men, I can try to swing something with Pa Mendy.

Those two have seven kids, of which four still live in the house.  Suzanne, in many practical senses, runs the house.  She’s a lady of probably 40, and she’s very nice although quiet.  I’m using a pretty bad internet connection, so pictures are taking forever to upload…so if you’re curious as to what these people look like, please check out my pic site and look at the captions for indications of who’s who.  Suzanne looks nearly identical to her sister Binette, who is probably a little over 30 and a pretty vibrant personality.  Then the last sister in the house is Ester, who’s a little under 30 and quite overweight, but also fun.  (I wish I had more interesting descriptions of these people, but like I said, I have no idea what anyone does.)  The last kid in the house is Jean-Jacques, who’s a few years older than I am.  (For those who wonder how Mère Vitou kept giving birth at such a ripe age, I have no idea.)  He, like the others, is very quiet and keeps mostly to his own room, but he coincidentally dresses very similarly to me and is a really nice kid.

The other two occupants of the house create by far the most noise, but are also my favorites to be around.  Those two are Suzanne’s kids, Michou (9) and Mamy (7).  They’re both on vacation from school, meaning they have little to do but create chaos around the house.  They’re often playing a board game I think they call Lideau, which is a relatively simple game that involves rolling a die to get your pieces to a home base (not unlike Sorry).  If you land on someone else’s piece, you get to “eat” that piece and keep it until the other person rolls a 6 on their turn to reclaim the piece.  Whenever one of Michou’s pieces is in close pursuit behind me, he tells me menacingly, “Je vais te manger avec du ketchup,” or “I’m going to eat you with ketchup.”  It’s in pretty good humor, but it sums him up quite well.  I also sometimes play soccer with him in the small backyard or tiny front yard, which often leads to horrible back injuries after slipping and falling on the hard tile.  Such is the rainy season in a tiled backyard.  (Much to my back’s relief, though, we’ve stopped playing so much soccer since their cousin François left after visiting the house for a couple weeks.  No one told me he was leaving, which is too bad because he was unbelievably nice; he would never eat any of my pieces in Lideau).

Mamy is even more effervescent than Michou.  She was responsible for most of the 300 pictures taken when the kids got their hands on my camera, and even when she speaks French, she goes so quickly and breathlessly that it’s hard to understand.  She enjoys pulling on my limbs and recounting stories of how she beat me in Lideau, but I guess I would expect that of a 7-year old.  She’s really quite fun to be around.

There are various other people in and out of the house at all times.  Honorine, the Mendys’ fourth daughter, lives in a suburb of Dakar and works at the American consulate, but she and her 20-something daughter Olga are in the house quite a bit.  She’s great…quite useful at working me through situations that I don’t understand, since I can always call her and ask her a question that she’ll respond to in English if she knows the answer is complicated.  I’ve done that multiple times while lost on my way home (Dakar is an impossible city to navigate).  Then we have three maids…Sally, who does everything (cook, clean, hang out with the kids), and two others who switch off between morning and evening, so that there are always two in the house at a time.

So I think that’s about as much as I can describe given the relatively small amount of knowledge I have about my family.  The fun of being with them isn’t finding out about what they do, though, but rather how they live, which is inherently much harder to describe.  It’s a very relaxed lifestyle, with many people hanging out in front of the tv watching dubbed soaps (usually Spanish or American) at any given time.  Other than weekend lunches, meals in the house aren’t a huge deal; people eat dinner on separate plates and whenever they feel like it (i.e., often at different times) on weeknights, whereas our weekend lunches tend to be traditional affairs around a communal bowl, which is fun.  Otherwise, like I said, there’s a lot of hanging out and talking.

Anyway, I’m off.  I’ll certainly devote separate posts in the near future to describe the house, the neighborhood, and the food, as well as something resembling a daily schedule, which should give a much better idea of what life in the Mendy household is like.  Until then, I hope this brief introduction of the gigantic family suffices.  Talk to everyone after The Gambia.

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