Yeah boy!

That is the name of a fish, or at least its pronounced that way. It is also an insult, meaning a skinny, good for nothing loser who has neither a job, nor any sort of future. Weird.

Fish. These things remind me of Joal. We only eat fish at my house in Joal, only. The only expectation is when relatives come over and then we get meat. To think that I was a vegetarian before I came here.

This has nothing to do with anything, so I will start talking about Easter, because its so much more interesting.

So people talk Easter up, they talk about it months in advance. The old people talk about the Galax, this peanut butter like yogurt that all the christians make in mass quantities to give to their muslim neighbours. They make tons of this stuff! I came home one night to find two tubs filled with the sauce, the peanut sauce with sugar, Bwee (or monkey bread, a fruit from the boabab tree) and water. Two tubs, I mean I could have sat in these tubs and had it come up to my waste. Along with that they had two tubs of millet, these small balls of millet that would be added to the Galax later. My host mother said she bought 15 kilograms of sugar, 20 kilograms of Bwee, and a ridiculous amount of other ingredients. They used a hose to fill up the basins, like a garden hose because the basins couldn't fit under the faucet.

They spent three days making the Galax, spending the first day buying all the ingredients and then putting them all in a bowl together. The second day they started making the sauce and the millet seperately. The third day they mixed them together and dished some into little bowls to give to all of the neighbors. This whole holiday is about solidarity, showing the muslims that even though it is a christian holiday that they are involved too. It is also an expectation, since during Ramadan, the holiday that ends Korite (the month long fast for muslims), all of the muslim families give out Soow (pronounced "so"), a yogurt like milk drink, to Christian families. Its weird too, how all of the christians fast during Lent, like actually fast. Some don't even drink water during the day. Its nothing like in the States, we choose one thing to give up. They say that they fast during the day, give gifts to the poor and pray. The idea behind the fasting is to give the food you normally would have eaten to someone with less than you. Despite their insistence on fasting, I know no one that actually did this, that gave anyone anything out of the ordinary.

This could be the reason that people got excited about the Galax, because they made so much of it that you could pig out on it for hours and never eat it all. Its funny though, because sometimes people actually do this, just eat cup after cup continuously and then end up very sick the next day. The peanut sauce isn't the easiest thing on the stomach.

Galax. That was it. For talking the holiday up so much, and mostly the young people who talk about how drunk they get each Easter (a common way to celebrate holidays among the catholics here), nothing much happened. I went out but no one else in my family did, they just watched T.V. and acted like normal. Everyone just seemed bored. We went to church, then came home and lazed around.

People talk. There is a word for it in Wolof: Waxtu. It means talk for the sake of talking. Talk in circles.