Eating to live- Senegalese Village Diet

I just realized I have yet to write a blog on the thing that I think about the most- FOOOOOODD!!! obviously....So I am going to try to give you all a run down on the typical Senegalese village diet and table manners, or should I say dirt manners?

First off I will give you a summary village meals. Lunch is always plain rice with peanut sauce. The sauce is made by boiling water, then adding peanut butter to it. A special stick is used to stir this mixture which makes it boil up and become fluffier. Spices, pounded onion, pepper and occasionally dried fish (gross) or small bits of meat are added for flavor. In general this sauce, mafee, is not bad it is just becomes kinda drab when you eat it every day.

My favorite sauce

There are two dinner options for me. One is a couscous that is made either or millet or corn with a sauce served over it. My favorite is when there is couscous with a leaf sauce that is made by boiling leaves, and then adding spice and ground peanuts (right now squash is also added giving me a real vegtable!). My other dinner option is boiled corn that turns into a kind of mush and then has either a peanut or leafy sauce in the middle. When I first got here I could not stomach any of the mush but now, I have gotten used to it... Never thought I would say that.

For special events cheeb is cooked. This is rice that is cooked with oil and spices. Then a few veggies are fried up to serve on top and if you are lucky, fish is fried and put on top as well. I do not particularly like cheeb as it just means oily rice, no sauce, and in my case only a small bite of fried cassava, but other volunteers eat cheeb everyday for lunch and see a pile of veggies in the center. I only saw that many veggies for Tabaski, the biggest holiday of the year.

Something I find particularly cool is that for the first time in my life I am completely eating seasonally. For instance, I had never seen a squash here until about a month ago when there was a massive harvest in my village and now I get a bite of squash everyday. Squash is usually boiled or fried and is a delicious addition. Before squash it was okra, and before bitter tomato and before that it was... humm I forget!

Plato-y food, when the sauce is good I can handle it!

Much to my mother and grandmother's chagrin, but to my pleasure, I eat with my hands here!! Myself and 8 other women crowd around one bowl for meals, using only our right hand to scoop out rice from the portion of the bowl directly in front of us. To get the sauce you kinda pull some of the sauce from the center to the rice, roll it in your hand for a bit, then those it in your mouth, licking off the remainder of the sauce. If I did not look attractive when eating before I came to this country, there is no WAY I look anything less than hideous now.

Lastly, I want to clarify that what I eat is totally different from Anna, who is a mere 10 km away from me, and is completely different from what someone would eat 70 km away in Tamba. Every village is different and every family is different. I recently discovered that my family's food is especially poor and there are other compounds in my village that eat more fish, meat, veggies etc... Yes, I have been using this knowledge to my advantage and eating food at other homes :)

People love it when I eat at their home. The funny part is that I am always given my own bowl, as I am a special guest, and then brought in a room to eat alone. Either that or a few people will awkwardly watch me eat by myself as they wait for their bowl. I compare this to having a visitor in the states, sitting them in front of the table as the rest of the house goes and watches TV. Weird right? Gotta love culture! 

While I sure do miss American food and find myself dreaming (literally) about salad bars, multigrain bread, Mexican food, asparagas and shrimp...ok i need to stop making this list...I have found that because I often have no choice of what I am eating, I have learned how to eat to live, not live to eat, which is something that us Americans love to do.
With that said, every time I go into Tamba I shove myself with goodies and treats and delicious care packages that you all have provided me. Sooooo I have definitely not made it a rule for myself but it is an interesting thing to think about and man am I excited to not eat rice ever again!!!!!!!

My favorite baby!! Aminata, isnt she adorable! And yes, very dirty :P