En Famille

Until I came to Senegal, I had lived alone for nearly 30 years. Sharing meals usually meant I was in a restaurant with a friend or on a weekend visit to the country or at home in the Midwest with my family.

Here in Senegal, my ritualistic standing-in-the-kitchen-eating-whatever-I-bought-at-the-deli is undergoing re-programming. At Chez Cretin-Oliveira, we share breakfast, lunch and dinner.

Breakfast is Nescafe and fresh baguette with butter and jam, most recently homemade apricot and raspberry from Nathalie’s mom. We discuss the day’s agenda briefly. We laugh at Seal’s silliness. And then, Nathalie grabs Seal and his backpack, and they head off to pre-school and work.

Lunch--around 1 pm—is a sitdown whenever Nathalie and Seal get home. Ieta and Suzette prepare lunch-- usually fresh fish, salad and veggies—and they sit with us. We’ve had a really full table for two weeks because Nathalie’s sister Janette has been visiting from Switzerland….six adults, all sharing their lunches with Seal, who just moves from person to person, eating the parts that he likes. It’s a mini-UN…French is dominant with some English translations for me and side conversations between Paul, Ieta and Suzette in Woloff.

Dinner is always leftovers from lunch, which is fine with me because the fish is too wonderful to believe. We eat when we get around to it, usually sometime after 8. We catch up on the day, laugh at Seal, laugh at Paul (who is the world’s biggest flirt), talk about the world news (which is my job) and then clean up. Around 9:30, the table is clear, everybody else is on their way to bed. I sit down to write.

It’s none of the “ex” words: not exciting, not extravagant, not expensive. But it sure is nice.