where is my husband?

A week into my life here at site, and what I’ve been doing mostly would be considered “getting to know my site.” That means I do a lot of walking around town, greeting people, having short conversations with strangers on the street, and hanging out with my Senegalese host family. I also have been spending some time with my sitemate, talking about culture, logistics of living here, and so on, and trying to get up to speed with the particulars of the current project she and two other PCVs here helped to get going.

I can’t say I’ve done the same thing any day since I’ve been here, which is a relief from training, though I do encounter the same questions from almost anyone who talks to me for more than a few minutes. When they find out I can speak Wolof, a little, nine times out of ten I get some variation on the following:

Q. Where is your husband? (alternatively, Do you have a husband?)
A. Usually I say I don’t have one. Twice so far I’ve made up nonexistent boyfriends, but I’m not very good at lying, especially in Wolof, so I usually just go with the truth.

Q. Why don’t you have a husband?
A. Mostly I say I don’t have time for one. Sometimes I say I just don’t want one. Sometimes I’ll go with a line I learned from another PCV, and say I already have two husbands, in the States, and the guy usually laughs, and says that’s bad, and I say, well men can have two wives here, why can’t women have two husbands?

Q. Can you cook ceebujën? (the traditional Senegalese fish and rice)
A. No, I cannot. And I really have no desire to learn how, but I don’t say that. Fortunately my lovely family here cooks lots of things other than ceebujën. I think this question is just to tease me, to see how Senegalese I am - i.e. if I can already speak Wolof, then maybe I can cook them dinner.

Q. What can you cook?
A. Usually the quick answer I give is eggs, and pasta. But those are easy! people say, and it’s true. But it’s more difficult to get across the fact (in witty repartee) that at home I use cookbooks, and if I can read the instructions, then I can usually cook it. There’s not really any such thing as a cookbook here, so if you can’t cook something from memory, you’re not any kind of cook.

Q. Can you pray?
A. No, not the way Muslims pray here. This is a question less often asked, but I’ve gotten it twice in the last few days, and I think it is also to tease me about being white and Western and living in an African, 90% Muslim culture. There are Christians living here in my town, many fewer than Muslims, but they are accepted and the two groups live together peacefully. If I wanted to go to church, I could, though the service would be Catholic.

The husband question is the most ubiquitous, because a 25-year-old woman without a husband is very rare in Senegal. I always laugh it off, especially when the guy asking the question then offers to be my husband, which just seems ridiculous at first, but then you get used to the fact that it’s all part of how they joke around here. Everyone seems to also love to ask me if I can cook Senegalese dishes, probably also because cooking is solely women’s domain here, and a very large part of their lives. Again, I deflect those questions with humor, because it’s way too early for frustration.

My patience and sense of humor will definitely be tested and tried time and again before I return to the land where it’s perfectly acceptable to be an unmarried woman, where no one but me should care if I can cook, and where my religion is my own business.