Overseas Briefing: Kaity Potak '11

DAKAR—Apart from figuring out every method possible to prepare a banana, learning the myriad ways one can eat a mango or a grapefruit, discovering the custard apple, and having a ten-minute game of circumlocution/charades with the man at my favorite fruit stand only to learn that clementine in French, is, brace yourself...clementine, I have learned in the last three months here in Dakar how to eat around the bowl.

Basically, in a sentence, it is every rule of politesse that we are taught as kids in the United States systematically turned on its head. Eating on the floor? Check. Eating with your hands? Check. Actually, that’s a lie; you may only eat with one hand: the right. The left is reserved for other, dirtier tasks. (Use your imagination to fill in the blanks.) Spitting food on the floor if you don’t want it? Oh yeah, baby.

You can steal other people’s food from across the bowl, you can lick your fingers and you can leave the “table” whenever you want. It’s truly a glorious system.
Okay, but really. Eating around the bowl with my host family each night is something that I’ve come to love. Actually, I might have fallen in love with it at first sight. It’s amazing how truly shared everything is.

My family eats with spoons sometimes, but my host mom always uses her hands and it is her job to divvy up the vegetables and meat so that everybody gets some. If we’re eating ceebujën (the national dish of Senegal, which translates from Wolof into, literally, “rice and fish”) she makes sure that I get enough fish and carrots. I’m still sort of shy around the bowl, although my endless search for any kind of vegetables has encouraged my assertiveness.

I’ve developed a different sort of relationship with food here. Sometimes I think they put vegetables in dishes simply for decoration. A dish is unveiled and it looks perfect for about 12 seconds, then all of the vegetables are put swiftly put in another bowl. The rejection pile is what I thrive off of. Oh, the vitamins. And fish? Simply a synonym for protein. Rice is there just because it’s tasty and makes one feel full. We all huddle together on the ground ... arms entangle, knees bang together, bread crumbs flutter around like confetti. Sometimes I don’t know what I’m eating. Usually I ask but sometimes I quietly accept ignorance as the better option.

Sometimes I contemplate what the Senegalese would do if faced with something like the food pyramid. It’s nearly always amazing. This onion sauce that my sister makes that we put on practically everything? Absolutely bomb. She knows what’s up. And who wouldn’t want to finish a meal with their family with mangoes, watermelon, bananas, and bissap juice? Approximately seventeen cups of sugar per ounce of delicious berry juice, I would guess — oh yeah.

By the time dinner is done at about 10:30, I am ready to crawl into my little mosquito—netted bed, make a bedtime wish that the electricity will stay on throughout the night to allow the fan to continue to run, and fall asleep to the sound of the call to prayer from the mosque down the street. It’s a beautiful thing.