Korite
Korite is the day of celebration of the end of Ramadan. Everyone wakes up early, they get dressed to the nines in their new komplets, shoes, jewelry, etc and show off. (Although most of my village could not afford new komplets, so they either just got new skirts, or a new pair of shoes and dress in an older outfit, but for the most part everyone has a new braids in their hair (except me)!) They go and pray together and then go household to household greeting everyone and giving small tokens like a 10/25/50 CFA coins or candy. They go pray again and then they start the preparations for their “feast.” Most families purchase a goat to eat on this day of celebration, but because my family and the people in my village are exceptionally poor, not everyone was able to conform to this standard. My family went in with a few other households to buy a goat, some of the other households in my village bought a few chickens instead.
My counterpart came to ask me to use my knife to cut his family’s goat’s throat to kill it then to skin it and so forth, but I down right refused him that option. Firstly, I didn't want my knife to kill an animal and secondly, it was my best knife, I didn’t want them to dull it and ruin it with cutting bones. It has become apparent to me, like children, adolescents, and even some very privileged adults in The States, most Senegalese do not take care of anything that is lent to them because they didn’t buy it so they don’t appreciate the value; they ruin/break it, give it away and/or will never give it back. I wasn’t about to lose my knife this early in my service, plus I am working on being able to say, “no” to people. (It is actually on my 30 things to do before I am 30 list, and I thought living in Senegal would help me with that, but I find myself caving in even more than I did before.. Stay tuned (next blog) for the juicy details of that statement!) But this request was easy to stay strong to because I have refused to let my counterpart’s family kill a rooster they “gave” me to eat. I told them if I know the rooster, I will not eat the rooster, but if it is an unknown rooster and it shows up as meat not as an animal, I can eat rooster/chicken. (After I said that, they joked with me about it for a few weeks, then one day I asked where my rooster was, and they said they sold him since I didn’t want to eat him. Heh.) They don’t really understand how I could be ok with eating a random piece of meat but not one that I knew because here they buy the live animal, they kill it, pluck it, skin it, cut off the meat, and cook it. It isn’t like back in The States where we go to the grocery and find all the options of meat with the degrees of quality, cut or portion size and there is no option of boneless of boned meats, they have one option: kill the animal, prepare the meat, and figure out how to store the meat not immediately consumed without electricity to cool or freeze it. Most times, people in village eat meat several days old that is evidently spoiled because they don’t want to waste the meat that their precious money bought and they end up getting very sick from that consumption decision.
I knew that our family bowl was going to have meat in it, which was very exciting since it would be the first time we had any form of meat, including fish, to eat, but when lunch was ready, to my surprise, I saw my first vegetable too! I finally ate some onion!! I was only allowed to have a very tiny piece of meat, no bigger than my thumb (which I secretively gave half to my cat since he is looking a little malnourished as well), but I was able to eat several spoonfuls of onions! Our meal consisted of rice, onions and some goat meat. That is the big feast of a poor bush village family. However, I don’t want you all to think this is the eating habits of everyone in Senegal, but because I am in the poor south in a poor village, this is how they live. The majority of my stage mates (even volunteers in my region) have more variety to their everyday meals and defiantly to they holiday meals. I just “lucked out” on my site placement so these details are the only ones that I am accustomed to and can illustrate in my blog.
After everyone ate, the adolescents went to dance the rest all day. The day was filled with extreme heat, where some girls/women wore komplets that were so extravagant that had headscarves with bows and flowers on top of their heads where even at 0900, I could see beads of sweat rolling down their faces, not even penetrating the thick layers of makeup they applied earlier in the morning.(Which, by the way, when my sister came to my room in the morning, I had no idea who she was because of how they put on the make up here, they don’t look ANYTHING like what they normally do.. it is kind of scary actually. It is stage makeup boarding clown makeup!!) I am still confused on how that can be managed. I personally took several breaks throughout the day where I had to go into my room, strip down naked and just poor water over myself to cool off and just lay there for an hour before I could even think about putting on my komplet and facing the heat again. I guess they were born here and are used to it? When I get too hot and need to “rest” aka, go strip down and cool off, they tell me that my body isn’t strong yet, but after two years I will be strong. I didn’t realize that “strong” meant being able to endure heat, but here it does.
When people asked me how I liked Ramadan and how Korite was for me, I would reply, Ramadan wasn’t nice, Korite was hot, but I am happy because from now on (until next Ramadan) I can eat lunch!
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