Sounds Like Senegal

Sounds Like Senegal
I wish I could take all the sounds of Senegal and bottle them up for my people back home. At my host family's house, the sound of shuffling feet echoes ghost like through the hallways because the walls are hard and the floor is tiled. So while I can always tell someone is lurking around by the schhh schhh schhh, it is almost ghostly because no can be seen making the shuffling noises.

The children's voices are becoming very familiar to me. Mama tends to cry a lot and so does Aisha but Mama is more baritone while Aisha more treble. Mama likes to boss everyone around and generally at the ripe age of 3 has a pretty good sense of humour about life and is often shouting this or that at everyone, all the time, morning, noon and night. As for the rest of the kids, you can be assured that they are well heard...

Though I manage to sleep through the early morning call to prayer most mornings, there is the odd occasion where the loud tinny voice of the religious guy barrels through and wakes me. There is also the odd time when a loud cricket wakes me up first. The giant crickets have been sneaking into my room through a hole beside the door, and even after I shoved newspaper int he hole, I can still hear them cheep cheep cheeping softly while scratching to get in.

Every horse pulling a buggy has a bell or two on them ranging from something like a dinner bell to something off of Santa's sleigh. The taxi cabs use their horn as a means to navigate the roads without stopping or slowing down. The giant trucks hauling loads of materials do the same, though I rather think that noone is going to bother getting in their way.

In the evenings the Talibe boys congregate in the soccer field outside my house. I have never seen them appear, but it happens sometime after soccer practise is over, and shortly after the sun goes down. I think they are mostly waiting for something to eat and a front step to sleep on before the food is handed out.

The other night I was drawn out to my balcony because I could hear their voices and it sounded that there were a great many of them, and there were. I watched as one boy did sloppy somersaults across the entire length of the soccer pitch. I watched older boys tenderly scoop up the smaller boys and toss them around to their delight. I watched a boy renact crawling through an invisible war field, his long legs, thighs as skinny as calves, stretching insect like forward and back until another boy interrupts him by coming over and kicking him in the side. I watched one boy urinate on the ground in front of our house. I watched them wrestle. I watched them play soccer with a ball of garbage. I watched them laugh, and throw rocks at each other, and sit around talking like there wasn't a care in the world.

Today we delivered home made donuts to the Daaras, the Kornic schools where the boys live mostly and learn the Koran. Talibe boys are a well-known problem, as in, the fact that there are droves of homeless boys wandering around looking for hand-outs is well known, but there doesn't seem to be an apparent solution. I find it frustrating because it is hard to get a straight answer, or a complete answer, as to why there are all these boys homeless and poor. I also tend to wonder about where all their sisters are, and how life is happening for them.

Today was my first view into where the boys live, who the volunteer 'social workers' are, the Maribous (Daara religious leader type figure), and what the Daaras look like. I suppose those details will have to wait til another day...