This post may not make much sense to you if you don’t read parts 1 and 2a first.

So I arrived in Senegal. I stopped being excited about Senegal by the second day. Here’s what we were told in America about Senegal:

• It’s just like America; they’ve got telephones and televisions!
• They eat the same food they serve at the Daara house (which was very delicious)
• It never gets cold!
• There’s hardly any crime.
• It’s much cleaner than New York City.
• You’ll still get regular schooling.

Most of this was true. But here’s what we weren’t told before going to Senegal:

• Yes, there are telephones and televisions in Senegal. But not where we lived. And the little television we did see was in French.
• Yes, they did eat the same dishes as what was served at the Daara house in Brooklyn. But not all the time. No one mentioned that breakfast was just bread and tea (or coffee). No one mentioned they had a lot of other dishes that we never saw in America that were not so tasty. And no one told us the dishes were cooked differently in Senegal than in America giving it a slightly different taste. (I think it was the peanut oil and spices they used in Senegal.)
• True it never got cold. During the day. At night, it could get quite chilly. And during the day it was BLAZING, BURNING, BI****** HOOOOOTTTTT!!!!!
• Yes, there’s very little crime in Senegal. But that didn’t keep people from stealing my stuff.
• Yes, Senegal was much cleaner than NYC, but that isn’t very hard to do.
• We did not get much secular education in Senegal. At first I didn’t care much, but as the years went by, it started to become a concern.

Here’s what I would have liked to have known before I went to Senegal:

• The toilets were little more than holes in the ground.
• There was no toilet tissue (if the right hand is for eating take a wild guess what the left hand was for!)
• There were a lot of strange bugs that scared the sh** out of me and everyone else. Spiders as big as mice. Flies and mosquitoes. Scorpions. Flies and mosquitoes. Anthills the size of Volkswagen Beetles. Flies and mosquitoes. Something the Senegalese called a Wonk that left boils on your skin if it walked on you (the insides of the Wonk were so poisonous, we would kill it, and stick another insect inside its guts and watch it die.)
• Did I mention flies and mosquitoes?
• The water tasted horrible. This was more a problem when we moved to to our permanent home in Senegal. It was a compound belonging to the Shaikh that drew water from an underground aquifer. The water tasted thick and slightly salty. At first, we had to swallow the water in large gulps to keep from tasting it, it was that nasty.
• Diarrhea. I remember seeing several American kids running to the hole-in-the-ground bathrooms clutching their buttocks trying to keep their crap from leaking.
• There was no baseball. Okay, I should have expected this. But it was still upsetting not being able to follow the Mets.
• Not everyone liked us. Truthfully, most of the Senegalese were very kind, patient, and caring towards us. Especially at first. But as the years passed, the novelty of us being American started to wear off. No doubt, our arrogance and behavior had something to do with this.

I don’t want to make it seem as if everything was bad in Senegal. It was very difficult, no doubt about it. But it was the most important thing that ever happened to me, besides being Muslim.

Overall, that first year or so in Senegal was actually pretty good. There were about 15 or so American Muslim boys, all African-American. My sisters were the only two girls and they stayed with one of the Shaikh’s wives.

In the beginning of the program, things were pretty organized. The food wasn’t great, but it wasn’t all bad either. We eventually got used to the water, small breakfast and toilet situation. We had two teachers, one for Quran and one for Arabic.

Our first Quran teacher didn’t really challenge us. His name was Serign Lo, and he only gave us two lines a day, in Warsh script (if you don’t know what this is, don’t worry. It’s just another way of reciting and writing the Quran)

Our Arabic teacher was a man named Serigne Boge (Serigne is a French word; I’m not sure of the technical meaning, but in Senegal, it meant something like “Sir” or “Mister.”). He could speak English, Wolof (local African dialect), French, Spanish, and Arabic. He was really smart. But a little impatient with us. However, I think it was more our attitude that was the problem.

We were 15 American boys. Not just American, but African-American. Not just African-American, but from New York City. Not just from New York City, but from Bed-Stuy, Harlem, the Bronx, Queensbridge, Fort Greene, and other rough neighborhoods. All of us had attended public school at some point. Many of us (including myself) had lived in the projects at some point.

To put it short, we had serious mouth, attitude, and behavior issues. It wasn’t something the Senegalese teachers were used to.

Brother Muhammad, for his part, could set us straight in a second. He was big, Jamaican, and had lived in New York for most of his adult life. He was also well educated and knowledgeable in Islam. When we acted up, he would lecture us for hours on end. When that didn’t work, he could always resort to the stick.

Usually, the lecture worked.

Below is a picture of some of the American kids, Brother Muhammad, Serigne Boge, my friend Yusuf, and several Senegalese kids. I think this picture was taken around 1992. I’m not in this picture.

Unfortunately, Brother Muhammad couldn’t stay for long. He stayed with us in Senegal for the first couple of months or so, then he had to return to America. He had a wife and young children, plus he was always trying to raise more money and support for the program.

When he left, we were in the care of our two Senegalese teachers. Amazingly, things didn’t go that bad. There were some things that could have been done better, but hey, no one died!

We lived in a compound that belonged to Shaikh Mourtada Mbacke, the man who was funding the whole program. Truthfully, the buildings in the compound were much better than the housing of most Senegalese. There was running water, electricity, and a few real toilets (these were mostly for the Shaikh and guests; not us).

I’m actually a little ashamed to think back how ungrateful we were considering the conditions of most Senegalese people.

I remember how clean the environment was. I hardly ever got a pimple in Senegal, even though I was going through my teenage years. And you will never believe how many stars there really are in the sky until you see them from a place like Senegal.

The sky was literally filled with thousands of stars that I could never see in New York. And I learned to recognize many famous constellations like Scorpio, the Big Dipper, Orion, Sirius, and much more. We could see satellites flying through the sky. And I must have seen dozens of shooting stars.

We lived in a city called Mbacke that was very close to the holy city of Touba. I’ll go over the whole Senegalese Sufi-Mourid beliefs surrounding Touba and Shaikh Ahmadou Bamba in the next post.

We saw other animals besides bugs. I remember watching a flock of vultures eat a dead donkey down to the bones. Our baseball games were often interrupted by young boys herding large flocks of sheep or cows through the field. Horses and donkeys were still used by many people for labor and travel. We even saw a few camels being ridden every now and then.

This may not seem like much to some of you, but for a bunch of boys from the ghettos of New York, this was amazing.

Even though French is the official language, Wolof was the local African dialect and was spoken by everyone on a daily basis. French was used in schools, government, and business. Wolof was used in regular common speech.  At first, I only knew how to beg and curse in Wolof. I became fluent eventually, but I’ve lost most of it since returning to America.

I’m not an expert on Senegalese culture, so I don’t want to say too much. It’s not fair to judge an entire nation by one small town or village. And most of what I saw in Senegal was just the cities of Mbacke and Touba.

The national dish of Senegal was called Chebu Jin, meaning rice and fish. This isn’t the correct spelling, but that’s how it’s pronounced in English. This is what we ate almost every day in Senegal. And what tasted so good once a week at the Daara house in Brooklyn, became very tiresome every day in Senegal.

With diarrhea, sickness, and rice and fish almost every day, it should be no surprise we lost a lot of weight in Senegal. I was already skinny to begin with. I would continue to grow taller, but would just become even more skeletal. Even now it’s disturbing to see pictures of myself in Senegal.

As I mentioned earlier, the weather was very hot. Senegal had a rainy season where it rained frequently for about three months. Once the rainy season ended, I didn’t see a drop of rain for the next nine months.

At the top of this page is a video of a typical Senegalese village. Now where we lived was much better than what you see there, but it does show the life of the average Senegalese.

Oh, and for those that say Islam was spread by the sword, Senegal is about 80% Muslim. And no Arab armies ever invaded or colonized Senegal.

Only French Christian ones.

Brother Muhammad stayed in America for about six months. He came back with another batch of American kids.

And this is when the fun really started.

Read about it in the next part.