Suck it up

Lately I have been particularly sensitive to the Wolof concept of "Muñ." Muñ is loosely translated as "grit your teeth and bear it," or "suck it up." It's how people hear deal with disappointment, you stay quiet, you hold your head high, and you silently barrel through it. They are such a tough people! They tell me that I do an ok job muñing, being so far away from my home. But I really don't have disappointments of the same magnitude as them! Lately I had to muñ when the cows ate all my peppers. I made a half groan half holler when I saw the stubby leafless stems, but afterwards, I muñed. The women here are told to muñ when they are having babies. No screaming, can you imagine? When I burnt my figure at the beginning of my service on some hot ash, causing a huge bubble to rise, I cried a little (what a fool I was!) and I have been ceaselessly teased since for not muñing.
These days I have also made some funny observations about medicine in Senegal. Usually older people get most of their medicine from plants in the countryside; every leaf or twig they bring back almost always cures diarrhea or constipation. They don't have any cure for headaches, though, so most people buy "Perecetamon," the French aspirin that they pronounce, "Prestamon" and that they find sold half price at the garages because they're expired. Mostly every illness, if its not stomach related, can be classified as "cibiru" (fever or malaria) or "fatiguement" (tiredness). I basically urge everyone to see the village nurse to get the real deal. They sometimes ask me for bandaids, not to cover any sore, but to put over the area of "fatigue" in their body so that the bandaid's mysterious occidental healing powers can seep through and ease the ache. Lately the kids in my compound come in every night asking for one, but really they just want my attention (: I especially love the kid who asks for bandaids but won't touch food after I've ate some of it because he doesn't want to turn into a white person!
Oh, the kids. They have their own version of "punch buggy" that I have been taken with. It's called "chodok," and you punch someone and say "chodok" and then they have to catch you and punch you back. The moms don't like that I'm encouraging this in their children. I play too much with them. The other day, I was cleaning my backyard and carting the trash out to the countryside, because that's what we do here, and the kids were begging to be allowed to push the wheelbarrow and saying thank you, Fatu, afterwards. Hey, no problem!
In other news, my sister Seynabu just had a baby. The little girl, named Khady, is 3 kilos, which is 6 pounds! That is heavy and healthy for a Senegalese baby. We are all very happy, but Nabu is very tired. This was a big deal baptism, and lots of fun for me, since Nabu is 23 like me and we get along really well. So I am glad all is safe. And they call the baby a "tomato," which is also what they call foreigners, since we are both a kind of shade of red.
Work is going fine. The cashews are about to be ripe, so I am repairing my fruit dryer. I am about to do a seedbed of tomatoes and eggplant. And my music class is the highlight of every week. We are learning rhythm and they actually understand a lot of it! The French nursery rhymes we sing are always a hit, too. Soon I hope to go on vacation, and then the rainy season will come, and then, BAM this wild crazy Peace Corps lifestyle will be over. That's the way I like to look at it (: