Good Morning Dakar: Talibe and Funerals

It's in my daily activities and interactions that you can really get an idea of what it's like to live in Dakar. This morning has not been anything special, but it involved interactions with both death and Talibe, which are sad but constant facets of life here.

Talibe are the children who supposedly attend Quranic school, and live there under the care of a marabout. This marabout supervises their education, which consists of memorizing the entirety of the Quran in arabic (resulting in an ability to recite the Quran, but no comprehension). For each meal, all of the children are sent out into the streets to beg for food and/or money. On principal, I refuse to give the children money- it is given directly to the marabout, and I'm not about to support adults using children to beg for money. However, if I have food handy, I have no problem giving that away.

Every morning, the Talibe knock on our family's door asking for food, and reliably Ma will send one of the maids or one of the girls to go to the door and hand out sugar cubes. Usually, when I poke my head out to see what's going on, I see Moune laying sugar cubes in their food tins that are already filled with sugar cubes. I guess it's the cheapest food ingredient that families prefer to give away.

I don't understand why they even bother giving to them everyday if they're just throwing more sugar at them. That does not make a breakfast. That makes diabetes. So, today, I left the house for school when the talibe came, and I hid around the corner so Moune wouldn't see me giving away my breakfast (a small loaf of bread) to the kids. Really, Ma? This bread costs about 50 cents for a baguette about three feet long, and the kids can ACTUALLY eat it.

So I gave away the breakfast my host family gave me, and bought breakfast number two at the boutique across the street. My new favorite is bread with laughing cow cheese and tuna spread (whopping 50 cents total). When I was talking with fruit man, he told me he attended the funeral yesterday of the guy who used to sell coal across from my house. I didn't know the guy at all, but apparently he was very polite and everyone liked him. He felt sick for two days, and then he went to sleep and didn't wake up on the third night. It's widely accepted by the community that he got sick from handling coal without any sort of physical protection every day.

Sudden deaths are terrifyingly common here. More than once, I've come downstairs for breakfast to hear Ma tell me, "Dafa, my sister's father is very sick, and he might die. I'm going to go visit them in Rufisque, for the day, I'll be back later." or, "Awe won't be doing laundry this week because her mother just died and she needed to go to the funeral out of town." or like just yesterday, when I was talking with Momo, my host brother. I was asking about his siblings, and he told me he has one older brother who is still alive, but had two older sisters who died when they were 27 and 30 years old. People deal with a lot of premature or sudden death and loss on a much too frequent basis here.

I am grateful that I haven't experienced many similarly tragic events in my own life, and am always at a loss for words when I am confronted by them here.

This is the street I live on. The left is the front of my house.