written Sunday, 3 June 2007
Friday morning I biked over to a neighboring vllage to attend a wedding. Many of my family members had gone the day before, or even several days before, and spent the night, so I was biking by myself. The road to the neighboring village is really just a path through the bush (too narrow for cars, but there is a long way around that cars can take), so it's a very nice bike ride, although it had rained the night before so the path was muddy and even more rutted than usual.
As I was biking along, I passed a man by the side of the path fixing his bike. I asked if he needed help, but he said he was fine, so I continued on. After a few minutes he caught up to me and rode along behind me for a while. We exchanged greetings and chatted about where we were coming from and where we were going, because that is what people do here. He asked if I had a husband, and when I said no, he said he would like to marry me. Which is also very normal - men here always ask me to marry them and take them to America, and women ask me to take their children back to the US with me. So I just laughed it off and said, "how can you want to marry me when you don't even know my name?" "Okay," he said, "my name is Ousmane Ngom. What's your name?" I told him my Senegalese name, Khadija Tanjian (no point in lying because it's a small village and he could easily find out my name. And if anything, telling people my name makes me safer because then people know that I am in the village chief's family).
"Okay," he said, "now we know each other. Now will you marry me?"
"No," I said, "I have a fiance already." (My imaginary rich American fiance has come in handy many times here. I am starting to wish that I had just gone ahead and said I was married, but it's too late to change stories now).
"Is your fiance here?" he asked. I said no, he's in America. "Well then, he doesn't count," the man said. "You need a man here. Pull over so we can talk."
Up til this point it was a very standard conversation that I've had about a million times since coming to Senegal, but when he asked me to pull over - in an isolated area in the middle of the bush - I started to get a little nervous. "No, I can't stop," I said, "I'm running late." And I started to bike a little faster, to try to put some more distance between us. But he also sped up, at which point I really got scared. I saw him reach out his hand to try to grab the rack on the back of my bike to force me to stop, but I biked even faster so he couldn't reach it. "I said pull over!" he yelled, as if he were angry now.
"NO!" I yelled, and biked as fast as I possibly could. My Peace Corps bike is about a million times better than his ancient one-speed bike, so there was no way he could keep up with me, but I was terrified that I would crash my bike or blow out a tire by going so fast on the muddy, rocky path, and then he would catch me.
But I didn't crash, and after a minute I looked back and saw that I had gotten so far ahead of him that I couldn't even see him anymore. But I still kept going as fast as I could until I reached the village.
At the village I pulled upp to the little store at the edge of town, but I was so worked up that all I could think of to say in Jaxanke to the man at the store was "there is a bad man out there". He probably thought I was crazy.
After I caught my breath a little I continued on to the compound where the wedding was being held, where I found my host sisters and told them what had happened. They said I should tell my host fater, who is the village chief, and the other village elder-types.
So at the end of the day I went back to my village (accompanied by my sisters - I wasn't about to go anywhere alone just then), and told my local counterpart what had happened, and then he got the other important men and the chief together and told them the story.
Since the man had told me his name they at first thought that identifying the man wasn"t an issue, but when I told them that I spoke with the man in Jaxanke they knew he had given me a false name, because it was a Serrer name he told me and there are no Serrers in the area who speak Jaxanke.
Nevertheless, with the information I gave them that the man spoke Jaxanke and French, and by asking around about who would have been on the path at the same time I was, within just a few hours they had identified the man. (Pretty good detective work, I thought).
Apparently the man hasn't come back to the village - because he is afraid of consequences against him, my counterpart says. But if he does come back, the elders are going to go talk to him to tell him that they know who he is and what he did, and that they'll be watching him, and if he ever does anything again they're going to turn him over to the police in Dialacoto. They're also going to hold a meeting of the whole village to tell them what the man did, as a sort of public shaming, and also to warn anyone else against messing with me. They say that if anything ever happened to me, the special toubab guest, it would bring shame on the whole village, so this is a big deal to them.
It's a very different way of dealing with the problem than would have been done in the US, but I think this is likely to be even more effective than the American style of calling the police, and even if he gets sent to jail for a while, he would get released after a while and the community would never know that he is a bad person. So I feel perfectly safe and happy with this solution.
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