Abaraka, y'am'!

For those of you keeping track, this will be the fifth time I’ve missed Thanksgiving at home, and as fate would have it, the second time I’m celebrating it in Senegal of all places. It would be easy enough to let this get me down, but in the spirit of the holiday I am finding things for which to be thankful. It’s really not very hard to do when you’ve been living in the third world for nine months; I feel grateful for who I am and where I come from literally every day.

But the last thing I want to do with this post is give you a list of things that make me thankful. You can probably imagine or infer a good many of them from other posts I’ve written or from what you know about me personally, and the rest would just be boring or misrepresentative of my Thanksgiving thanks givings.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do with this holiday here. The two choices I have right now are regional house or village. You’d think it would be an easy choice, and for most volunteers it is – American holiday, American people. The trouble for me is that I have a complicated relationship with the Kolda house and the volunteer community that uses it (the subject of a separate blog post that I’m no where near ready to write) and I’m slowly learning how to deal with it. In some ways I feel more comfortable and free at the Kolda house than in SPB. It is after all an American haven where I can run around in shorts, with a cup full of frozen peanut butter m&ms, speaking English, watching movies, cooking American comfort food and being Cibyl instead of Nafi. But other times the house is so crowded and messy and debaucherous that it takes the wind out of these sails. And Thanksgiving at the house is sure to be crowded and messy and debaucherous.

So then there’s village Thanksgiving… insert superficial analogy about the foreigner coming to learn the ways of the natives, living off the land, depending on the people who know it, harvest season, blah blah blah. Not good enough.

Here’s what sealed the deal:

A few weeks ago in village I was thinking about the upcoming holidays and my Christmas homecoming (now less than a month away!) and the warm-fuzzy-happy-anticipation-relief-to-be-home-with-people-who-love-you feelings. I realized that I don’t get those feelings when my taxi starts climbing the little hill towards the Kolda house. I suppose I feel relief to unload my bags and drink something cold, but I never know who will be on the other side of that door, which makes it not home. On the other hand, when I get to that last stretch of my dirt road where I can start to see the tops of the huts and I turn off into the center of Saré Pathé my heart begins to swell. I can’t help but have a huge silly grin on my face when I roll into my compound amid the kids swarming and yelling “Nafi naata! Nafi naata!” They don’t always understand me, or I them, but I always feel like I’m coming home to people who love me. The more I thought about it the more I realized that if I can’t spend this holiday with my American family, I want to spend it with my Senegalese family. It may not mean anything to them, and we’ll probably just eat millet and leaf sauce like we always do, but it means something to me. Thanksgiving is family and love and home, because aren’t those always the things we’re most thankful for?

So tomorrow I’m going home to Saré Pathé Bouya to a family that loves me while I’m far away from my own. If that’s not something to be thankful for, I don’t know what is.