The Way We Live

This morning, it occurred to me that for four months, I’ve had the luxury of sleeping until I wake. Please don’t interpret that to mean we are living in a “sleep interruption-free zone”. Remember, we have Daniel the sheep living out back. He’s quiet now, but I don’t expect that to always be the case. Why? Simple. Daniel has the biggest set of balls I have ever seen on any animal. [Who knew sheep came with that kind of equipment?] I can only imagine how emotive and expressive he will become when he’s not had a chance to use them for a while. And as there are two girlie sheep living next door, on the other side of the big wall…think Romeo and Juliet…I think we can safely assume that Daniel will eventually have a deep and noisy desire to get acquainted.

Anyway back to sleep interruptions. Senegal is 95 percent Muslim. The most common practice here is Sufism, which is a more tolerant kind of Islam than is practiced in the Middle East. It’s common to see women with their hair covered by a hajib and to see men carrying large prayer beads, which move through their fingers in accompaniment to continuously silent repetition. The devote pray in public, spreading a prayer rug wherever they are and proceeding without regard for who might be watching. Recently at the Dakar airport, I watched a woman proceed through the entire 30-minute prayer ritual of standing, kneeling, touching the forehead to the ground over and over in proscribed motions. She was pregnant and labored at the beginning. In the end, she actually seemed refreshed by her prayers.

We have a neighborhood mosque a few streets away. The domed roof of teal tiles outlined in gold is visible from my terrace. The tiles are beautiful and incite my curiosity about the interior. Every morning at 5 a.m., the amplified call to prayers is broadcast through the neighborhood. It is not a beautiful sound. It is tinny. It is not melodious. It is not beautiful. It does it incite my curiosity. It occurs five times throughout the day. It makes me want to throw things.

Like I said, we are not living in a “sleep interruption-free zone” because if the mosque fails, we’ve always go the rooster who lives with the sheep on the other side of the wall. He is happy at sunrise. He is also very very loud. He doesn’t have an amplifier and he doesn’t need one.

Welcome to The Almadies, Dakar's nicest neighborhood.