Overdue Post

So I realized that I haven't actually blogged about my family and living situation at site. I've referenced it and there are multiple letters en route to different people in the States about my family, but nothing for the general B's Blog-Reading Public, if you can call it that.

So basically, my family is gigantic...probably the size of the entire village in reality, plus the surrounding villages due to cousins marrying, etc. However, I don't call them all my family, though in this culture, everyone is your brother, sister, uncle, mom, dad, etc, esp if they share the last name as you and Diouf is a very popular Serere name, so I have a lot of relatives. There are about 50 people who live on my compound, and that's not an exageration. From what I can understand, there are two very old men (each the head of the 2 main large families at the compound, one's my "dad" and the other thinks he's my husband), 2 very old women (one is my "mom" and the other I don't really know where she fits in the picture), 4 babies being breastfed (loose estimates in age: 2 months, 8 months, 11 months, and 15 months), about 20 kids between the ages of 2 and 10, a few early adolescent girls, about 10 guys in their late teens to early 20s, 8 "moms" (ie women of childbearing age with kids ranging from probably 25-35, with one who is probably about 45), an unknown amount of men/husbands (bc some of my "host brothers" have more than one wife and some of the wives also have husbands in Dakar or otherwise away and I haven't met them or figured out which men who are always around actually live at the compound, and maybe a few random other people thrown into the lot. It's a lot of people and means each meal bowl usually has between 8 and 12 people and there are probably about 3 bowls (at least) for each meal for each side of the compound, depending on the time of day and side of the compound.

These "sides" of the compound I'm referring to are the two large families that live at my compound but I haven't yet figured out how they are actually related. One side is the Dioufs (my "real" family) and the other side, technically, are the Gnings--both VERY Serere last names. The families seem to interact well together, based on my current understanding, but I just cannot figure out where the Gnings came from. No clue, but give me some time.

My hut is a 3m x 4m cement room with two doors and no windows. . I’m still working on pimping out my pad, aka hut, and just today I bought fabric to hang from the beams in the roof to bring in color and help keep the dust and debris off me. I also want to paint the inside of it yellow and maybe get some fake flooring, quasi-tacky curtains, and battery-operated wall light…after I get a bed, somewhere to put my clothes, a table, and chair. It’s so overwhelming to even know where to start, not to mention having a limited budget, plus the fact that I need to be discreet about what and when I buy things so that I don’t flaunt the money that I do have