Every time I cook with my sisters, they ask: “Do you eat this in America?” Time after time, I stare into the pot: fish heads bobbing in a red sauce, green curd-like paste made from leaves off our tree, spaghetti with mayonnaise, rice with palm oil. “No,” I shake my head. One day, my sister Sainabou finally exclaimed, somewhat perplexed: “Well, what do you eat in The Gambia?” I promised to show them one day.
Since Day One, my sisters have been offering to arrange my marriage to a Gambian husband. With each new person I meet, it’s more of the same — a flood of questions about why I lack a husband and child. In a culture where family life plays such an integral role and people are expected to get married and have babies, Gambians don’t understand how a 25-year-old woman could not only be single, but also say she doesn’t want a husband. I’ve tried various tactics to deflect the interrogations and marriage proposals, many of which have been less than successful.
When everything is foreign, it’s easy to forget what you know and just go with it because “that’s the way it is here.” Perhaps the only place that seems semi-normal is my language classroom, where I am learning Jola. I say “semi-normal” because the classroom is the porch outside my teacher’s house.
Sweat leaked down my cheeks and off my nose although I stood in nothing but my underwear. It was eight days after arriving in country — only the fourth with this family — and my Gambian sisters were stripping me bare below the corrugate iron roof that absorbs the African heat.
I shaved my head — all 10 inches of my thick, brown hair — four days after I moved to Africa. Why?
After the flight to Brussels, more waiting and the final flight to Gambia, we arrived after nearly 36 hours of traveling. As we arrived, my nerves were replaced with pure excitement
But neither the time nor miles seemed to matter. I reconnected with many friends and family and we picked up where we had left off, so to speak, and caught up on all our misadventures. When we weren’t swapping stories, the best part was to just be — like old times.
