It’s been raining for 24 hours. Pretty much solidly. Little breaks for about 10 minutes here and there. Everything everywhere is damp. I’m damp. My computer is slightly damp, which definitely worries me… I feel slightly trapped in my room, but frankly, I’m kind of grateful for that. My parents were just here for six days, which was a Magical vacation in so many ways. But coming back to village, immediately having a death in the village (a friend’s father…), has left me strangely drained. I think it was more the day and a half without my parents and without my village friends, as just another toubab on the streets of Dakar, which truly drained me. I saw some ugly things in Dakar and was called a bad, rude person by a man who was at best trying to get me to go to the bank and make change for him, and at worst trying to get me into a compromising and unsafe position. I called him rude right back (I can be Sooo mature), sneered, and walked away. Anyway, I’m home now, where I’m Rama Niang, where the men don’t try to marry me, where there aren’t beggars, and where it’s a lovely 73ish degrees. One reason this constant rain is a lovely blessing.
Wanna hear a story? Last night my parents called to make sure I’d gotten back to village okay and was readjusting well (after a week of sleeping in air-conditioning and having constant loving support and familiar/l companionship…). At the end of the conversation my dad asked if I’d put down the lavender they mailed me (it’s supposed to repel scorpions). “No, not yet. I’ll go do that when we hang up.” So I walked into my room from the back door, and right next to my front door was a 3 and a half inch scorpion, dancing with an inch and a half long beetle, ¼ or which was pincers. Froze with sudden adrenaline, I hoped maybe pincer-beetle would kill the scorpion for me. But no. The scorpion ran away from the beetle (!!!), straight under my bed. So, what could I do? No one was at my house or my cousins’ house next door, because they were still in social-all-day-funeral mode. So I called my friend Modou, who came straight over. He’s Always completely chill, and calmly pulled my empty backpack out from under my bed, shook it (carefully), and killed the thing when it ran out. Ever since, I’ve been having guilt about getting it killed… I can’t explain, but it’s like I’m personifying the dang things. I mean, it probably just wanted to get out of the rain, and then was scared of a beetle, and then was running for its life when, Squish… But ya know, it just couldn’t stay alive in my room. Not acceptable.
Speaking of scorpions, my dad showed me that you can see all of scorpio on the southern horizon here. It was really nice to look at the stars with him and my mom, all three of us being further south on this planet than we’d ever been before (in Saly Niakhniakhal). We ate ridiculous deserts with whipped cream, house-made ice-cream and crème-anglais (yummmm). This is my family, guys; we eat a lot of really yummy stuff when we get together. Pizza with crème fraiche, yassa poulet, shrimp, curry, mafé, croissants, mangoes, frites with Senegalese mustard, all with a daily supply of fresh café au lait… I got the chance to externalize all my fears and stresses that come with this experience, like, being unable to survive the heat, being unable to do my job, unable to meet the expectations of my villagers, irritated with the expectations of my villagers, being lonely and making connections with people that have an expiration date (in a sense…), fear or mortality and isolation. All of this stuff came out in floods of stress and emotion, and I definitely did the taboo thing of crying in public in Senegal a few times, the first of which was just when I first got to hug my mom and then my dad. Mmmm… Thanks for coming guys! It was perfect J
P.S. (added a week after initial writing, now that I have internet at will publish this now) I’m totally over that whole feeling bad for the scorpion thing. Two days later there was another one in my room. And ya know, it came in cause it wanted to be dry. Again, it was raining. But here’s the deal: the power was out. Which meant I saw the thing with a headlamp, called my brother over from next door, and spent the next twenty minutes (before retreating to my mosquito net) frantically scanning in circles around me with my little lamp that could not be worn on my head because that would mean flying things in my face instead of just around my face. Scorpions, we are not friends, and as long as you stay in your zone, scribble around feebly like you do, like your body is too heavy and lopsided for your little legs, good for you. But if you enter my domain, you will die. And I will have no regret.
And while I’m on a roll, a quick additional word about the insects of the rainy season: there are at least four types of at least 3 inch long beetles. There are little brown beetles, big brown beetles, big black beetles, bigger black beetles, HUGE black beetles (but not quite at the 3” mark), giant pincer beetles, tiny black beetles that fall through my mosquito net, dung beetles (they’re pretty cute, pushing their perfect little balls like kids on a slow day. I imagine them meeting up in a corner with them building little dung-men). There are mantises! They’re cool with me. There are flying things that come out in terrifying swarms (plague style, I am NOT exaggerating, like better to sit in the half dark and risk the scorpions than chance even a cell phone light because you will be overtaken in seconds) to beat themselves into lights until their wings fall off so they can enter a crawling phase of their lives. Creepy. When I go to sleep with my fan pointed into my mosquito net, when I wake up there are literally dozens of dead mosquitos who have been held against the net by the force of the breeze. Gross. And then there are spiders. Oh the spiders… Frankly, my rule is this: If you aren’t a scorpion, and are under an inch long, you’re good to go. Just don’t get ON me. If you are bigger than this, you gotta go. And if you bite or sting, sorry, but you’re dead. You have trespassed on my space, and my sense of physical comfort and security is threadbare. At some point in my life I will probably feel bad about this, but it’s the best I can do right now.
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