Teraanga: A Welcome Like No Other

The passage of time is such a funny thing. As the saying goes, time flies when you’re having fun. Coincidentally, time also seems to slow during a slump, and it is during those periods when one counts down the days until a break to escape the doldrums and re-fresh the mind. That duality of pace has defined my first year here in Senegal.

Due to continuously changing circumstances it has been challenging to sit down and write. But, my mind has continuously returned to the rhetorical, “If not now, then when?” There may never be the “perfect” moment to do a lot of things in life, but, if there is one thing I have learned during my Peace Corps service thus far, it is the importance of flexibility when things don’t go as planned as well as resilience in the face of challenges. So, even though there may never be a good time to write and life keeps happening for better or for worse, there is so much I want to share with family and friends about my experience.

Though I have had my fair share of lows in the past year, the good moments always seem to eclipse the more challenging ones, and if I were to attribute that to one thing that sets Senegal apart from any other country in the world it would all lead back to one word: Teraanga.

Teraanga, which means hospitality, comes from Wolof, the predominant language spoken in Senegal, but it has deep cultural significance across the entire country. In Pulaar, the predominant language spoken in the North of the country, where my village is, it is called Teddungal. While the average American might picture the kind, “welcome-to-our-home” hospitality of the Midwest, Teraanga is a type of welcome that transcends the domestic boundary and extends to perfect strangers, even simply on the street. From my own experience, when one is a guest in another person’s home here in Senegal, they are welcomed with zeal. Sometimes a half-serious joke is that you must slaughter a goat or sheep upon a guest’s arrival so that you have plenty of good meat to eat and your guest can want for nothing.

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When I first arrived in Senegal, myself and my cohort were welcomed to the Thiès Training Center (TTC) with the full gusto of Teraanga. Staff members, language instructors, and administrators alike cheered, danced, and beat tam-tam drums upon our arrival. It was to such a warm welcome that I remember instantly thinking, “This is where I am meant to be and what I am meant to be doing at this moment in my life.” I felt happy and ready to go, despite the jet-lag and exhaustion of travel.

Throughout the following two and a half months of Pre-Service Training (PST), my days were exciting but busy as myself and my entire cohort worked to complete the strenuous training schedule. While at the TTC, my time was spent studying technical skills and the cultural competencies necessary to be a good Environment Volunteer. Additionally, every other week my cohort and I left the TTC to live in a village, practice local languages, and gain a better on-the-ground cultural understanding of life in Senegal.

My training village, Tatene, was about an hour outside of Thiès, and while there I focused on integrating into the community and studying my new assigned language, Pulaar du Nord. Though I spoke no Pulaar upon arrival, I felt welcomed immediately. No one in my new host family laughed at me when I looked around in bewilderment as they tried to explain with a variety of gestures that I was to be called “Ami Ndiaye” in their family and that it did not mean “house,” “key,” “room,” or anything else in Pulaar – it was my name. I remember frantically scrambling to write down words as my first host father in Senegal, Papa Ndiaye, set the tone for teaching me vocabulary by sitting patiently with me, pointing at things, and telling me what they were. For example, when he pointed at a chicken and said “gertogal” I quickly caught on and wrote in my notebook “chicken = gertogal.”

Teraanga was embodied in my host sister-in-law, Penda, who instantly took me under her wing, allowing me to help her cook breakfast and go to the small boulangerie in Tatene to pick up baguettes for the spaghetti breakfast sandwiches, which were always topped with ketchup — a carb-lover’s dream. I was taught by my host mom to make the local millet couscous, or leechiri in Pulaar, and included in the preparation of lunch from time to time with my other host sister-in-law, Binta. In the evenings, I would go to the soccer field in Tatene with other members of my Community Based Training (CBT) group, where I would cheer on my host brothers as they scrimmaged with their friends. At night, while watching Wolof or Pulaar dramas on the television, Penda, her small daughter Maïrame, and I would sit with the rest of the family and talk quietly in broken French. Gradually more and more we spoke less in French and more in Pulaar, getting to know one another while scrolling online to look at traditional Senegalese outfits on Pinterest or listen to Senegalese pop songs on Youtube.

Breakfast Time

Lunch - The National Dish

Evening Football

Photo Captions:

1. My host sister Habsa and I made the spaghetti, or in this case, macaroni breakfast sandwhiches one morning in Tatene.

2. Binta and I sometimes cooked "marro e liddi" (in Wolof "cheb ugen"), which is a rice based dish with fish and a variety of vegetables to be shared around a bowl with family.

3. Some evenings, I would go watch my brothers and their friends play football at the soccer field in Tatene -- a beautiful time of day to play as the sun was setting.

While in Tatene, I observed for the first time the divide between women’s work and men’s responsibility in the house – with women taking on a disproportionate amount of the work. Early on I decided that, in an attempt to help alleviate some of the stress of having an extra person to take care of, I would try to help out where I could, for example sweeping the porch, in order to allow the women in my family to have a moment to rest.

Myself and my fellow trainees balanced our first round of community integration with building friendships amongst ourselves and forming relationships with TTC staff. When we were allowed to venture outside of the TTC into Thiès for the first time in October, our language instructors guided us on a tour of the city and regularly helped us to gradually become more independent on our own excursions. Once our 8 AM to 6 PM classes were over for the day, we gradually learned to go to the market to buy beautiful Senegalese fabric or try street food, to do our laundry by hand, or to spend time going on runs, hanging out, or just talking with one another.

On top of all of that, all of us were physically adapting to the newness of the extreme heat and a new diet. At times myself or other volunteers would need to be picked up from our training villages for medical reasons as our bodies acclimated to new microbes and a new climate. I certainly was not immune to this, and navigated my own midnight medical adventure with the help of the medical staff and my language instructors who kindly woke up in the middle of the night to help take care of me and ensure I made it back to Thiès for the care I needed.

When back in Tatene, the Ndiaye family continued to teach me about their culture with patience and good humor. But such a welcome didn’t just apply to them – a warm inclusivity was extended by the entire Tatene community throughout my time there – yet another example of Teraanga in the broader sense. One house in the village allowed us to use their yard as a training garden to practice technical skills, like the creation of a tree nursery, which we would need to be able to do at our permanent sites. And, after our first week in Tatene, myself, the other volunteers in my language group, and our language instructors were invited to a wedding! When we had no nice clothing to wear to the event, our host families generously lent us beautiful clothes, dressed us up, and at my house tried to help give me a dance lesson in preparation. Our language instructors accompanied us, explaining to us what was happening throughout the wedding, and acted as mentors and guides.

Despite the language barrier, the village of Tatene welcomed us all with open arms and treated each of us with so much care, that when it came time to leave, I inconsolably cried when going from house to house in the village to say goodbye. That was the power of Teraanga.

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In both the high and low moments of my service so far, Teraanga has continued to have a profound impact on me.

Once I was sworn in as an official Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) on December 8, 2023 and left for my permanent site in the North of Senegal after a bittersweet goodbye to my fellow volunteers, my central focus was building relationships with my new host family and gaining a better understanding of the needs of my community. I gathered my courage on a daily basis to venture out and explore my village while attempting to communicate in a new language. I walked to the river, to the rice fields, and sat outside with my host family trying my best to understand what was going on around me.

A week after being at site, however, I found myself on a day long ambulance ride to Dakar after contracting an abdominal infection from eating something I wasn’t used to on my way back to Thiès for COVID-19 vaccination. Once discharged from a five day hospital stay in Dakar and subsequent recuperation in the volunteer sick bay, I returned to my village January 1, 2024, where my new focus was now not only integration, but slowly regaining strength from my illness, which had left me much more physically weak than I had been before.

Despite that, my new host family, the Sow/Ba household, was excited to see me . I had initially met them all in November for a week long orientation stay called Field Orientation Training (FOT), where I was given the new name Sira Sow. It is common in Senegal to have namesakes, my own namesake being my host aunt, Sira Bolle Ba, who has since become one of my mentor figures. Though I had barely gotten to know my family when I was hospitalized, my host brothers, Sira, and my work counterpart, Salif Baydal Ba, regularly sent me Whatsapp notes while I was recovering, and welcomed me with open arms upon my return.

Once my host brothers sensed I had enough strength to start venturing back out into the community, they took me to their onion and pepper fields for two days of planting, and included me in their conversations while they made the classic Senegalese ataya, a sweet tea, sometimes brewed with mint, served in small shot glasses after lunch. Sira and a variety of host siblings and host sisters-in-law sat around and taught me Pulaar vocabulary, answered my questions, and included me in the hands on activities at the house.

Throughout the chaos of the most recent Senegalese election, my host family continued to make me feel welcome during the uncertain period when the election was indefinitely postponed. Sira and my host brothers patiently sat with me while watching the national coverage of the National Congress, in Wolof, and explained it to me afterwards in Pulaar. When it came time for the fasting of Ramadan (or Kork in Pulaar), I was checked in on, made sure I was eating, despite the majority of people’s fasting, and made sure to have beautiful clothing and Senegalese henna prior to Eid al-Fitr, or Dulde Kork in Pulaar.

When my host sister-in-law, Hadji Ba, came and visited the house around the time of the election, I quickly became friends with her, as she spoke English fairly well, and she became another person who embodied Teraanga. She instantly included me in activities, clued me in on cultural practices I had not formerly picked up on, and patiently taught me more vocabulary. I was included in family traditions at Eid al-Adha, or Tabaski in Senegal, when my host sisters invited me to get matching outfits with them.

One of the most challenging parts of Peace Corps service is the language learning curve when a volunteer first moves out to their permanent site. Not only is language incredibly important for building relationships with people at site, but additionally is instrumental for communication for work. In April I began teaching at the Primary School’s new Environement Club once a week with my school counterpart, Babacar Ba. Most people know that the 9-12 age group in any culture can be a fun, but also challenging age group to work with, let alone in another language. Furthermore, no one wants to be ridiculed by the 9-12 year old age group, let alone a classroom full of them for making a silly language mistake. It’s brutal!

While I focused on creating lesson plans with Babacar and collecting information to write a grant to provide the funds for establishing a Scholar's Garden, I also shifted focus to doubling down on language learning and polishing my grammar. My host brother Hamat, another one of my good friends, patiently sat with me as I studied and studied.

Hamat and Bocar, another host brother and friend, helped me translate the entirety of The Lorax into Pulaar, answered my questions about vocabulary for teaching, and allowed me to practice my lessons for them. On a particularly difficult language day, when I had bumbled my way through trying to communicate and was being hard on myself, I went to Hamat downcast. He typed out in google translate to avoid any miscommunication, “Avec le temps sa va venir. Continue de demander, on sera la toujours pour toi. Il ne faut pas avoir honte puisque tut e debrouille tres bien.” This translates to:

With time it will come. Keep asking, we will always be there for you. Don’t be ashamed since you are doing very well.

Beyond my host family’s exemplification of Teraanga, much like in Tatene, my pernament host community has welcomed with that same broad inclusivity. One of my family’s extended relatives, an influential man in my village named Modi Maham Ba, has treated me as if I was also a member of his own family. He and his wife, Aminata, have allowed me to use a space at their house to create my tree nursery and invite me over for meals every so often. My counterpart, Salif, invites me to spend time at his house occasionally to see what projects he is working on and provide guidance about my various projects. Shopkeepers in my village take the time to laugh along with me and patiently teach me money in Pulaar, an education which is supplemented with the help of my host brother, and oldest son of my Tokora, Ali Ba. When I adopted a kitten, people made sure to inquire about how it was doing, and most recently the Nefetan team, the boys competition summer soccer team, has included me in some of their early morning trainings.

Radiating outwards from my village, in the neighboring town of Taredji, one of the shopkeepers there, a friend of my host family, looks out for me, occasionally babysitting my bike as I run errands. Upon my return, if it is a particularly hot day he gifts me a small bottle of water for free, and makes sure I have a moment to rest before heading back to my village. On public transport, I always somehow come out of each trip having made a few new friends with people who have looked out for me, sometimes even sharing snacks that they have bought along the way. Not everyone I have met in Senegal has been welcoming, some even being openly hostile, which at times has left me feeling shaken and on edge, but I have found that there is almost always someone there that will help to stand up for me in those situations as well, be it a fellow volunteer or a host country national, even though I do not speak their language perfectly and am obviously not a local.

Lastly, the most powerful part of Teraanga is that it can also be unconditional. No matter what the circumstances are, people almost always find an excuse to make room at the lunch bowl for another person, will always invite a passerby to stop for ataya, or include people in what they are doing. Most recently, I have experienced this, despite the grief of my host family in the last week of August, when my wonderful, wise, and well-respected host father, Ali Poulal Sow, passed away. Though all of us were incredibly sad, my host family also checked on me, and I, for my part, tried to make sure that I was respectful and helpful as a myriad of guests flowed in and out of the house in the following week to pay their respects. We were all there for one another as we processed and comforted one another.

Overall, though my time in Senegal has been far from flawless, and there have certainly been times where I have gotten sick or felt lonely, I also recognize that there is so much I have to be grateful for -- something which I attribute to the culture of Teraanga. It is in moments of unquestioning welcome and care from perfect strangers that always overrides the stifling heat, the crowded cars in transportation, a rude comment, or other tough moments in a day. I have found, it is in the moments of collective uncertainty and stress in a community when people seem to, at times, double down on their care. And, it is the broad sense of inclusivity from an entire community that continues to amaze me on a daily basis. I have my moments where I feel frustrated, or perhaps someone is frustrated and not patient with me and, at times it can be hard to find the balance between taking time for oneself and being present with others, as the culture is often very focused on togetherness, but at the end of the day I have been able to ground myself, during the slumps in my service, in the good moments. Senegal has toughened me up, but also, for the most part, welcomed me like no other, and for that I feel thankful.