One of my good friends here works with a Protestant mission based in Dakar. She works with microfinance education in the villages in the Fatik region of Senegal (between Dakar and Kaolack). I found out last week that the village she was going to visit this past weekend was a village that I had planned on visiting before leaving Senegal. YWAM (Youth With A Mission, the organization I worked with in Costa Rica this past summer) has a base in the same village where she was going. I have been in contact with one of the DTS teachers at the school and had said that I would come visit. So I decided to go the same weekend she was going, and I convinced my friend Sandra to come along with me. The name of the village is Niakhar, and Sandra and I left to go join Anna on a Friday morning.
When we arrived at the transport center, there were no cars available to travel to Fatik, the largest "city" near the village. So instead we had to take a sept-place to Mbour, and then get another from there to Fatik. I always travel in sept-places when traveling between Kaolack and Dakar, so I'm used to them. However, this was Sandra's first experience in one. I think I've said this before, but if I saw a sept-place in the States, I probably wouldn't get in the vehicle. But here, somehow it's different. The sad little car looked like it was well-beyond its last leg. Sandra looked at it and gave me a look that said, "This car actually works? You're expecting me to get in it?" She walked from one end of the car to the other and commented on how she thought one of the tires looked low. But in the end, she ended up climbing into the backseat with me. She was squished between myself and a stranger. When we arrived in Fatik, we hired a taxi to take us the last 15 or so kilometers to the village.
My YWAM friend met us in the "downtown" part of the village and walked us to the YWAM base. The base is set right on the edge of the village. It has about 7 buildings and a large gazebo. We settled into our room and Samba (my friend) gave us a tour of the base. We ate some late dinner and stood on top of the building to watch the stars for a little bit before going to bed (the sky was fantastic because there weren't any lights for quite some distance).
Niakhar is an incredibly peaceful place. There are dogs, pigs, chickens, goats, and sheep running free throughout the village. I have come to associate pigs with Christians. I have never seen one in Dakar, but when you see a pig in a village here that means that there are Christians who live in that village (since Muslims don't eat pork). The village was incredibly calm and quiet, which was a welcomed change from the noise of Dakar. The one thing that wasn't quiet were the donkeys. I woke up several times in the night because donkeys outside felt the need to make their presence known. Many non-governmental organizations have offices in Niakhar, including World Vision and IRD. The majority of people in the village were wearing donated clothes, many obviously from the States.
The next morning we woke up and walked across the village with all the people from the YWAM base to attend church where my friend Anna had been staying. It was a small church service, maybe 20 people in the front yard of the pastor's house. The people of the village are mostly Serer, so the service was conducted in French and Serer. They passed out both French and Serer bibles as well. The songs we sang were also in both languages. The interesting thing about the music was that all the Serer songs were very African. The people had written their own praise songs in Serer with their own traditional music. However, the French songs were a bit more universal. After the service, they split into two groups. A group of women went into the house to discuss their microfinance activities with Anna. The rest stayed out in the yard and prayed for the sick among them. Which included a very ill child, a young woman that everyone said was crazy, and a few other people. They "laid hands on" the sick and prayed for many minutes over each one.
After church we wandered back to the YWAM base for lunch. We ate with the base director and chatted with her for a few hours afterwards. She is Swiss and has lived in Africa for about 35 years, 11 of which have been in that village. She has a heart condition and was told when she was young not to go to Africa because of her health. Her heart condition is worse than mine, but she has only run into problems once since arriving, and that was because she overextended herself with physical labor one day. The town she comes from in Switzerland is about 10 minutes from where I lived when I studied abroad. Needless to say, we got along quite well.
After chatting with her, my friend Samba took us on a tour of nearby smaller villages. We road on the pickup along grass "roads" between the small villages. Small villages in Senegal typically consist of a compound where only a few families live. Most of the buildings are grass huts, but often the building where people sleep is made out of cement. While driving in the pickup children ran after us screaming "TOUBAB!" The people were very nice, as is the norm here in Senegal. We were able to visit the village where my friend was born and lived when he was young. As we left one of the last villages, one woman gave us a HUGE bag of peanuts (which is one of the staple crops in Senegal).
We finished off the evening visiting the family of my friend Samba. We sat and drank Fanta while his siblings finished their homework and his mother worked on some embroidery. The youngest boy of the family was able to speak English, which was a great surprise. He wasn't fluent of course, but my friend Sandra and I asked him all sorts of questions that he was able to answer with simply responses.
On my way home the next morning, I was looking out the window of the pickup truck as we drove out of town… and I spotted someone I knew from Dakar! I was shocked. Never in my life did I think I would randomly run into someone I know when visiting a random village. But it was one of the professors from the language center in Dakar. He is from that village, and was actually sitting in front of the house he grew up in. Unfortunately, the reason he was back in the village was because his father had died. But, it was nice to see him nonetheless, as I had not seen him in over a month. And it turned out that he knew the people I had visited in the village. He had even taught Serer to the YWAM director when she first arrived in Niakhar.
From Niakhar, I travelled to Kaolack. I gave the peanuts to my host mother, and she used them to make a special sauce for the rice we had for lunch.
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