I do! No, I don't, wait... We're joking right?

I have gotten used to how people eat here in Senegal. I’m no longer intimidated by the one big bowl and everyone sharing. I usually build a little fort out of food and put the food I want in it, and I think it is understood in the family that none of their spoons or hands are to cross into my territory of the bowl. We had guests for dinner last night who were unaccustomed to my unspoken food-fort boundary and thus ignored it. Some of the people here eat with their hands instead of a spoon and I can deal with that, as long as the food they touch doesn’t come anywhere near mine. I spend the entire dinner just staring at which areas of the bowl they touch and make a little map of where it is safe to eat from. The lady was not only feeding herself, but also her toddler that was sitting on her lap. She would reach in and mash up some food in her hand and shove it into her baby’s mouth. As you would expect, my hunger diminished greatly at this spectacle and disappeared completely when she grabbed a hunk of meat and mashed it up into little pieces with her hands right on top of my food fort, telling me that I need to eat more. It was the same hand she fed the baby and herself with. At this point, I had two options, the first being a short microbiology lecture, the second being that I just suck it up and try to ignore everything that was going on along with four years of college level biology. Unfortunately, I didn’t know the French words for germs, dysentery, bacteria, or communicable disease, so I was left with the latter option. I find when I am under stress, my French is terrible, and so I just switch to English, and hope my listeners are able to interpret by my inflection what I am feeling. So I close my eyes and take a bite, and they asked me if I like it, so in English I think I mumbled something like, "Mmm….oh yeah….so good. It’s nice, when it’s….you know….mushed for you…so you don’t have to…Oh! More….that’s great…just keep…okay, that’s plenty I think." It took a lot of mental effort, but I was able to eat while keeping a fairly calm face. Afterwards I went to my room and brushed my teeth for about 10 minutes, and chewed a whole pack of gum.

Thinking this would be the end of my ordeal, I returned to the room with everyone to be social. The hand-food lady with the baby said something to me in French, which I translated to "Do you want a black wife?" I had her repeat it a few times because I was sure I had some words wrong, but no, she actually was asking me if I wanted a black wife. This brings to light the biggest problem with the French language. There is only one present tense, so there is no difference in French between "I go to the library" and "I am going to the library". This problem is evident when you want to describe things that you do generally, and things you are currently doing. So when she asked me if I wanted a black wife, I assumed she meant generally, do you want your wife to be black. I told her, "I don’t know, maybe" then she said, "I will give you one." What followed was mostly my fault. I assumed she was joking, so I agreed with a sarcastic tone, like I was playing along with the joke (In retrospect, I don’t know why I did this. The Senegalese are not renowned practical jokers or anything. I just thought they were messing with me because I’m foreign). Unfortunately, she was not, and I accidentally accepted her daughter as my wife. What followed was me backpedaling like crazy, trying to tell the lady, that I thought she was joking, but she found it strange that I thought she was joking, and I had to explain that in the states, it is a lot different and, oh, it was just awful. I’m fairly certain she knows that I don’t plan on marrying her 16 year old daughter, but I really just need to stay away from this lady. Every experience so far with her has been tragic in some way. I went back to my room and went through another pack of gum examining how my social awkwardness somehow transcends language barriers and continents.