Global Mission Stories
from ELCA Global Mission

A Trip To Xol-Xol - it's a different world

By Julie Boutwell-Peterson
ELCA Missionary in Senegal

There is more than one way to get to Xol-Xol -- and that is actually a good thing when you're driving on unmarked, dirt roads through the bush. We had been told the easiest way to find the small Wolof village was to follow the power lines, which, ironically, go right by the community without supplying it with any electricity. This was good advice except that the road turned out to be the one less-traveled and was thus that much more full of holes and bumps.

Still, we made it 12 miles within an hour, only having to stop once to ask directions from a shepherd boy, who merely said, "You just passed it. It's right there," pointing to a village we could see, not too far from our vehicle. We smiled embarrassingly and offered him a ride, as he was headed home anyway.

Julie with hosts

Our arrival was greeted by a smiling crowd, especially women and children who came from nearby homes to see the American couple with a little boy. Many of the smaller kids had never seen white people before and a few were afraid, even cried, at the sight of us. But most were simply intrigued.

We were invited to sit down on an outdoor bed under an open shade hut and people crowded around us, staring, smiling and laughing - and, not knowing what else to do, we stared and smiled back.

It was an amusing beginning to what turned out to be both a pleasant and difficult experience.

We were in this petite Wolof village about five hours inland from Dakar, the capital of Senegal where we live, to improve our Wolof, the dominant local language of the country. After studying it for several months, now was the time to really practice, to immerse ourselves in the language. It was also a time to experience life outside the metropolis of Dakar, where one can find anything one wants with enough money and enough time.

Xol-Xol (pronounced Hol-Hol) is worlds apart from Dakar and yet a fine example of how many Senegalese live in the interior part of the country -- in small wood, mud or grass huts without electricity and without running water.

The former chief and wives

We were staying with the former chief of the village and his immediate family -- two wives and about nine children. Their compound consisted of five huts, a stick-walled bathing area (in which you bring a bucket and soap and hope no one gets close enough to the wall to see between the cracks), a large shade tree and a few outdoor shade huts.

Acacia trees dotted the rolling grasslands, green now because of the rainy season, while pockets of sheep grazed lazily and colorful birds flew about haphazardly.

Indeed, we were far from the filth and crowds of Dakar, where family's cement homes are placed immediately next to each other with no green space in sight. For us, Xol-Xol was literally a breath of fresh air.

Almost as soon as we sat down, we realized how little of the language we knew - or, at least, how little of what we knew was relevant here. We could say things like, "How old are you?" "Where are you from?" "How many children do you have?" "Are you Wolof (Pulaar, American, French, etc.)?" "Do you speak French?" "What are you doing?" "What is your job?" and lots of other questions that were completely irrelevant under the circumstances. So, apart from, "What's your name?" and "My name is..." we didn't get very far in our communications.

We hadn't been sitting long when a man from a neighboring compound asked if Robert could take his daughter to the next city because she was very sick with malaria. Robert agreed, and Eli and I were left alone, staring and smiling at the women and children until the sun set an hour later.

When Robert returned, we were served supper, a delicious chewy chicken with onions and rice. As guests, we ate first with our host, Baba-Sal, the man of the house. What we didn't finish, the children and women would eat.

The hut, in Baba-Sal's compound, in which the Boutwell-Petersons stayed.

As the night wore on, Baba-Sal suggested that we go to our place for the night, the ELCA mission "health hut," where health workers come on a routine basis to treat patients from Xol-Xol and surrounding villages. The hut turned out to be a small cement building full of beetles, crickets, frogs and who-knows-what-else with one window looking out onto the cement outhouse.

Not having seen the place, we were the ones who requested staying there, thinking we would be more comfortable in our own private space. Thus, it was difficult to complain.

Just before leaving us to our privacy, Baba-Sal bravely killed a three-inch scorpion immediately outside the door to our hut. I had caught the deadly insect in the light of my flashlight as I shined it around my feet in an attempt not to step on the tens of large black beetles crawling unabashedly around the sand.

One hour passed and we were still trying to decide how to go to sleep under the circumstances. While the night air was cool, inside the hut it was ferociously hot and humid. Poor Eli, who was lying on a foam mattress we had placed on the homemade stick-bed, was sweating even while he was sleeping. We tried to lie down but the steep decline of the bed toward the wall along with the suffocating heat, the inside insect sounds, the recent sight of the scorpion and our own imaginations made sleeping fundamentally impossible.

"This is what it must be like to be in prison," I said to Robert, half-laughing, half-crying. He answered, dryly, "Yes, a prison in the Third World."

Shortly after midnight, we could take it no longer. We decided to retreat to Baba-Sal's compound and admit we were wrong. While I gathered Eli in my arms, Robert rolled up our foam mattress and sheets, and each armed with a flashlight, we took off across the village in search of the concession that we hoped we could find. It was a short five-minute walk that, in the end, we found easily by following our car tracks - easily, that is, if you don't count dodging random patches of animal poop, trying to keep a woken-up two-year-old calm, and having to negotiate a herd of sleeping sheep along our path.

Baba-Sal's family was sleeping when we arrived, but they graciously (and ungrudgingly) jumped up quickly when they saw us and, kicking off two of his sons from what would be our outside bed, Baba-Sal hung up a mosquito net for us and made us, truly, quite comfortable. After a little coercion, I convinced Eli to get on the bed with us and the three of us slept there, under the shade hut, under a bright pink mosquito net, on a foam mattress, on a homemade stick-bed while cool, damp wind blew deliciously around us. It was heavenly.

Just as the morning light began to break, however, Robert sat up abruptly in bed, waking me up with his movement. One of the ubiquitous large black "dung" beetles (who, interestingly enough, seem to have been assigned the rather odd job of gathering animal poop into perfectly round balls) was crawling on Robert's corner of the bed. This commotion, along with the crow of a nearby rooster, woke up Eli, too, and thus we were all up for the day.

Poor Eli had a difficult morning; he was grumpy, tired, generally out-of-sorts, often surrounded by staring children - and his parents could not get him any thing he wanted, especially Bissap juice, on which he had suddenly attached a life-and-death importance.

After about two hours of Eli's crying and general grumpiness, I announced to Robert that I couldn't handle it; we were going to have to go home that very afternoon. It would be different, I suggested, if we lived there, if we were settled and Eli knew the space and people. If that were the case, we would do just fine; but as things were, it was too much to bring Eli into this for just a short time. Robert agreed without any need for further argument, and we began to pack up our things.

In some ways, it was a personal defeat - and yet not completely surprising. Robert had already spent three nights alone in the village - each night, incidentally, sleeping outside in Baba-Sal's compound - and the three of us had arrived with the plan of simply trying it out as a family. I knew it would be difficult with Eli and the heat, and yet I wanted to at least try it. So even though I was let down by my short endurance, I was not completely demoralized. I had allowed myself the freedom to go home.

As we were packing up the car, having walked back to our cement hut, three of Baba-Sal's children came to give us fresh bread. We opened some peanut butter we had brought with us and shared it with them along with some milk. It was a mostly silent, communal breakfast that I enjoyed greatly - my favorite part being when the three kids shared the cup of milk without a word, each taking a sip and passing it to the other. It was an example in sharing that these kids could offer with pride to any American child - and I hoped it would not be lost on Eli.

At noon, we ventured back to Baba-Sal's compound to tell him of our decision. He insisted, of course, we stay for lunch - and it was shortly afterward that the too-late break-through came. Eli had fallen asleep while we were packing and I had put him in his car seat for safe keeping. He woke up shortly after we arrived at Baba-Sal's, refreshed, re-energized and surprisingly non-grumpy. He initially still wanted to play in the car - it was a known space and one that kept him from the hovering children - and yet he allowed several kids to enter with him and/or to play with him from the open door. By the time lunch was served about 2:30 p.m. (yummy chewy chicken again with rice and a bitter green leaf sauce followed by sweet hot tea boiled over hot coals), Eli was happily playing in the sand at our feet with the other children, drawing designs with sticks or filling and emptying small plastic containers. And, to the great delight of those around us, he even began to mimic some of the Wolof sounds he heard.

By the time it was time to leave, we wondered if we had made a mistake in deciding to leave so early. We had underestimated Eli's adaptability - and our own. For we, too, were starting to feel more comfortable - especially after a warm bucket sponge bath (shared only with a large frog) and the pleasant, tasty meals.

We would like to visit Xol-Xol again -- but in the winter when the temperatures are no longer more than 100 degrees.

If we do, we will plan to give up our privacy from the get-go and try to embrace the communal living the villages are known for. We will also know that the first 24 hours may be difficult for Eli, but that in the end he will probably adjust better than us. Perhaps, too, we will think of some good conversation-starters beforehand.

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