Postcards from Dakar: Easter

This weekend I celebrated Easter with my host family. I started off Holy Week by forgetting that it was Palm Sunday and not realizing why my host mom seemed especially annoyed that I said I wasn’t going to Mass as opposed to any of the other times when I say I’m not going to Mass. Whoops.

On Good Friday, I participated in a Senegalese Catholic tradition that even Muslims look forward to, and that is ngalax. Ngalax is a really . . . interesting dish that Catholics make for Easter weekend in ridiculously enormous quantities and then distribute to everyone in their neighborhoods, even the Muslims. When I had class on Friday afternoon, all of us Americans with Catholic families were talking about how much ngalax was in our house and alerting those of with Muslim families that in all likelihood that’s what would be for dinner in their houses too.

Ngalax is kind of like soup, only it’s served cold. Its primary ingredients are bouye (called pain de singe in French, which is “monkey bread” in English. It’s the fruit from the baobab trees), pâte d’arachide (not peanut butter, but close), and mil (millet). On Thursday night, Moussouba and someone who I think is an aunt produced a couple huge sacks of pain de singe and put them in huge buckets of water to soak overnight. (Huge buckets, I’m telling you. We do laundry in these buckets. And there were three of them). Pain de singe has this weird Styrofoamy texture, and it dissolves in water, leaving behind a ton of big brown seeds, like beans, and a bunch of pink stringy stuff. In the morning, Moussouba and the Aunt sifted out all the seeds and strings and added sugar at least and maybe milk.

To the huge buckets of bouye they added proportionally huge globs of pâte d’arachide, which they mixed with their hands. They then poured it all through a sieve, several times, until it had a smooth, uniform consistency and was almost as thin as water. Because there was so much of it, this sieving step took hours. I had to go to class before they were finished, which bummed me out because I wanted to go delivering with them. Judging from the final product, the last step just involved stirring in ton of cooked millet. It looks like tomato soup with couscous in it, sort of.

What does it taste like? Well, everyone here LOVES it, and you could tell that Moussouba and the Aunt, even though it was a lot of work, really enjoyed making it. Just like it wouldn’t be Easter for me without some baklava and day-old Peeps, it wouldn’t be Easter here without ngalax.

So that was the thing that happened on Friday. On Saturday, everyone went to midnight Mass, but everyone left at a different time and went to a different church. We got very dressed up for this. Anita and Fatima both replaced their braids with long, straight weaves, and Effie even did me up in some braids. My sisters have been planning to me tresser for Easter for months now, and I was a little nervous to let them take another stab at beautifying me after the Moussouba-does-my-makeup incident. But all they had Effie do were short cornrows not even half way back from my forehead, with the rest loose, and I like it. Alhamdoulilah.

Anyway, we got all dressed up and then took pictures together, like it was prom instead of Easter, and then went to church. Mass got out at about 1 a.m., and then we said hello and Alleluia to a lot of people. We also did les bises a lot more often than usual, which is always sort of a problem for me. Les bises is the French cheek-kissing thing, which is a really common form of greeting in Senegal, particularly among Catholics in my experience. In addition to the fact that kissing strangers can be a little awkward for Americans in the first place, les bises are also dangerously unregulated in Senegal. You kiss people anywhere from zero to four times, and I also never know which way I’m supposed to go first. This means I often end up continuing to kiss people after they’ve finished kissing me, or pulling away before they’re done, or kissing parts of their face that I had no intention of kissing. I’m always so relieved to see a hand extended towards me, because I can usually be trusted not to look like an idiot shaking hands. Sometimes, however, I do get teased for my firm American grip.

After church we walked to Habibou’s house and had a snack of reheated meat and goat-foot soup, and after that we took a taxi to a community center in another neighborhood where there was a big dance party going on, which we stayed at until around 5 a.m. It would appear that in Senegal, spending the night partying with your friends at Easter is just as important as spending the day visiting with your family.

All in all, it was a very different Easter weekend than I would have had at home. I spent a lot of quality time with my host family and did new and different things, which was good, but I will be happy to be home for Easter next year. I missed the Anglican hymns and the baklava and the egg game and the jellybeans and the people a whole lot.