Aksilem ak Jamm- Welcome to West Africa! (part 2)
Another thing here is that the families are enormous and everyone lives together. And consider this: to call someone "your cousin" is actually an insult, so you call your cousin "your brother". I finally gave up trying to keep the family tree straight here because everyone is brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles and nieces and nephews. Also, the daughter of your aunt is your "sister", not your cousin. Beware!
To make matters worse for us toubabs, polygamy is allowed by the Koranand many Muslim Senegalese take this clause very seriously. Therefore it's quite common to come across someone with two, three, up to four wives. Magueye himself has two and they both live in under the same roof. This is more or less uncommon; usually a man will keep his second wife in a separate apartment so as to not create jealousy among the wives. I'm not quite sure how Magueye's wives do it all together in the same house. Plus, both of them are pregnant! Talk about conflicting hormones.
As a result, the families are even more numerous because you have half brothers and sisters. Yaye, who is probably around sixty, has a little sister of twenty-eight years old -- they have the same father. And let me get another one straight: Yaye's niece is younger than her own daughter, meaning that niece is older than aunty. Wow!
There are kids absolutely everywhere you look here- 30% of the population here is under fourteen years old. The babies aren't coddled here the way they are in the States, and treated like fragile porcelain dolls. The women here strap them on to their back with duct tape and carry on with their daily chores.
I've noticed it seems the women do all the work around here: laundry, cooking, child-rearing, house cleaning. And the men? Usually lounging around in the shade working on their "social relationships."