Happy Tuesday

Things that made my commute to school enjoyable today:

1. My massage at this new spa that just opened out of the blue, right down the street from my house. Every day on the Car Rapide I notice the sign that advertises all kinds of scrumptious-sounding services, so today I decided to pamper myself (and my sore back) with a massage. It was the best 15,000 Francs (about 30 USD) I've yet spent!
2. Chatting with my favorite fruit vendor who still calls himself my husband.
3. Stopping into the corner store where I buy Cafe Touba, the traditional Senegalese coffee drink that costs 50 francs (about 10 cents), and chatting with Adamo in a combination of Wolof, French, and English. Since the coffee is so cheap, I tend to buy 2 or 3 a day, depending on my caffeine needs and my boredom level in classes. I have become such a frequent customer that now when I ask for coffee, Adamo corrects me and says, "you mean medicine?" He loves cafe touba as much as I do! Today he even gave it to me for free because he wants me to be "en forme" for class.

In other news, yesterday in Wolof class, we had the most pointless, yet most fascinating language/culture lesson that I could have had so far. We learned every single word for family members; yet most of them do not correspond to our English definitions.

For example, there is no word for the kids of your sister if you are a female (we would call them nieces and nephews), so you simply call them your children. Likewise, there is no word for your mother's sister or your father's brother (aunt or uncle) - you call them mom and dad. There are some crazy words for other family members that we in the States don't have names for, but what I thought was so interesting is the fluidity of family names and how in this case, language is probably shaped by culture.

In a culture where so many families live in the same house, it makes sense that there are less distinct names for each family member. Every adult/authority is simply your parent, and every child living in the house is simply your sibling.

Like I said, this language lesson in Wolof was useless because I will never use these terms in every day conversation; however, it was enlightening from a cultural point of view to understand the dynamics of my family and why all these random people are always in my house yet are not technically related to us. They are all related to us in some loose, informal way, and that's enough for Maman to take them all under her roof and feed them.