Korite

So, Korite was three days ago. It's the very big holiday that celebrates the end of Ramadan. It's been basically a huge subject of conversation for the past month that we've been in Senegal. After Korite, all of Dakar will be a big party. Everyone gets new clothes for Korite. Let's get our new clothes weeks in advance because the tailors will be so busy as Korite approaches. I wonder what we'll eat for Korite? We're all so excited for Korite, because fasting sucks. People spend more money than you can imagine on new stuff for Korite.
Well, needless to say, it didn't really live up to the hype. For me, anyway, it was a pretty average day. I didn't go to school, so in the morning I did what everyone else in Senegal has been doing for the past month, which is sleep to try and deal with the heat. For Korite my family got up at 8am to go to the mosque for an hour, but I wasn’t allowed to go, so there was no point to me waking up. I did get up later in the morning and sort of wandered around bored until they started making lunch. I offered to help and they quickly put me to work washing dishes. (Three buckets, one with soap, one to rinse, one to put the clean dishes in afterwards. This all takes place in the courtyard though, so it never really feels clean with the bugs crawling everywhere.) Our maid, meanwhile, was busy pulling apart most of a sheep into eatable bits and dropping them into another bucket of water to soap. It’s obviously very different from the pre-packaged stuff I’m used to, and what with the intestines lying around and the water it was soaking in not looking that clean I was pretty grossed out in a typical American way. I kept going to my room to drink water and cool down and try not to get too grossed out and grouchy about having to do housework on a day I thought was going to be a holiday.

(Tangent about our ‘maid’: It feels very weird to call Coumba that because she is fifteen years old and is very much a part of the family. She lives with us, but does most of the work and they call her to open the door or get them something even if she is watching tv or sleeping. They also make fun of her a lot, in a way that is sort of good-natured but hard to tell because it’s almost always in Wolof. She’s also sort of short and overweight and always dressed in sloppy clothes that she can get dirty, whereas the rest of the female members are slender and tall and dress impeccably. I was imagining her getting all dressed up for Korite in a sort of chick-flick outcast-girl-turns-beauty-queen fashion. Lo and behold, when I came back from Saint Louis, she had hair braided in this new way that made her look like a new person. And when she changed into her nice Korite clothes, she looked like a rock star, and one the brother’s cute friends started teasing her about how pretty she looked. If life were a movie, a Mandy Moore song would have started playing as the credits rolled over a montage of her going shopping with the cool crowd.)

But I’m getting ahead of myself. It wasn’t just the maid making the meal this time, my sister Aminata (or Ami-Colle) and I were helping. She was using a sort of large-scale mortar and pestle thing, almost like a butter churner, to mash up some onions, garlic and pepper. I helped pound that for awhile, then started separating garlic for her. I cut my finger. I don’t know, it was sort of fun, and it was nice to be helping and to be seeing how the food was made instead of just eating it, but it wasn’t exactly the holiday I had pictured. People wandered in and out. The men and boys watched tv or slept or lay around talking. The women stressed and cooked and cleaned. Ledaru, the little cousin, threw tantrum after tantrum, in the way that little kids are wont to do on holidays where they get overexcited. I took a nap. When I woke up, we ate lunch. (What we’d been making.) It was good, and nice to not have fish for once, but considering that was the big event of the day, it was uneventful. Maybe it was really nice for them to be eating during the day, now that Ramadan was over, but it seemed pretty low-key to me.
Finally, later in the afternoon I got to put on my pretty new Senegalese ‘boubou’, or traditionally dress. I like it a lot. It’s pretty lightweight, so it’s not too bad in the heat, although the sleeves are sort of long. I think I’ll wear it at Christmas, because I can’t think of any other time when I’ll be able to!

The idea behind Korite is forgiveness. You are supposed to go around and visit your neighbors and relatives. The greeting is like this:

Forgive me.
Forgive me as well.
May God forgive us both.

I can’t remember how to spell that in Wolof, but at least you understand the main meeting. You go around all day saying this to everyone, and then you’re all good for any past slights. Well, basically. I did go around and visit the neighbors some and have some more relatives quiz me on my Wolof. (I’ll save for another time my rant on how many things here are normal that would be considered SO incredibly rude in the U.S.)
Anyway, I’ve been trying to upload pictures from my trip to Goree Island and my trip to Saint Louis, AND from Korite, and facebook is being quite feisty and refusing to cooperate with me. But hopefully I’ll be able to soon!

Have I mentioned how ridiculously happy I am to be here? Come visit me in Senegal!