Magal: Part Two

Yesterday seemed a little calm for such a big holiday and now I know why... today was the social part!

People started arriving at our house by 9am (which means they left Touba EARLY). The women started on the big basin of onions to peel and chop for sauce. Once the onions had been finished everyone (all of the women) started specializing. By this time (11am) almost everyone had arrived. Like normal, the men sat outside the house, talked, and drank tea; the women were cooking; children were fetching things for everyone. After onions, some of the women prepared the other vegetables (cucumbers, carrots, tomatoes, and green peppers) and the rest cleaned the meat (two big tubs of beef not mutton!!) and made the marinated. Miss started on the sauce (onions, vinegar, bullion cube, msg, salt, oil, maybe mustard) while my host mom made a fire. Because there was so much that needed to be cooked, we needed more than just the one gas burner... so fire! A piece of scrap metal was laid out, on top of that a mound of sand was added, and then the kindling and wood. Once the fire was going a GIANT pot was put on the fire and the meat went inside. After finishing most of the vegetables, the women started bleaching the lettuce and picking off the brown parts (I joined in and helped). The meat cooked for maybe an hour or two and was then moved to another marinate of oil, mustard, bullion cube, vinegar (you'll notice a seasoning theme) and then into a giant metal colander/rice steamer over another fire to grill for a little. By this point it was about 4pm and people were getting hungry. The kids started setting up mats for eating, bowls for hand washing, and bottles of water. Next, the women started plating giant metal plates with a few chunks of meat, two huge servings of onion sauce, fries, lettuce, and chopped vegetables (which was covered in a dressing of mustard, oil, salt, pepper, vinegar). Six big plates went out and the 25+ men (I couldn't get a good count) sat around them and started eating. A few minutes later a plate was made and all of the kids (about 10 of them) sat down to eat. A few minutes after that the women made their plates and we sat down to eat.
I'm usually the only person who prefers vegetables and today was no different. There were 4 women at my plate total and we had two HUGE pieces of meat as well as a ton of other stuff. I let everyone eat my share of the onion sauce and fries while I focused on making lettuce wraps with the meat (which is really just a fancy way of saying that I was eating them both at the same time). I've gotten pretty good at eating with my hand (right hand only per cultural rules)... ripping meat with only one hand is kind of hard. Today was probably the best Senegalese meal I've eaten. I mean, really, grilled beef and salad - awesome.
After lunch we all got a can of soda (which is pretty impressive and expensive). Once everyone had finished their soda the house cleared out in a matter of minutes. We went from having more than 50 people to having less than 15. The remaining women did the cleaning and we all pretty much settled down to watch soap operas because it was fairly late. At one point someone gave me a baby to hold that started crying immediately upon being given to me and stopped immediately upon being taken away from me... oh well.

There's one more day until everything, hopefully, gets back to normal and my classes start again.

KO