Old Woman

Friends from the village

One unexpected visitor this past weekend in the village was Yai-Siet Badjie. Yai-Siet roughly means “Old Woman” in Wolof. Noone knows her age or will even try to guess it. On her national i.d. card under her age, it says “old woman.” She was talkative and funny, and even spontaneously danced for us. She took off her headscarf – a rarity – and showed me her full head of white hair. I found out after she left us that she serves as the village funny-person. This is not a clown, but someone who goes around to make people laugh and this is now her vocation. Through their hardships and daily routine, she lightens things up. If you don’t have a TV to entertain you, this is where to get your laughs.

Speaking through a translator (my brother-in-law) she told us some of the highlights of her life, starting with her happy childhood. She says she was so hefty that everyone called her “tourist,” as all tourists are quite well fed. She lost all this weight after having her 10 children, feeding them and keeping them alive. At one point in her life she was a uniformed police officer and later was a traditional dancer for foreigners. She says she earned so much money dancing she couldn’t even count it. Back in the day, she fell in love with two different men. Her father wouldn’t allow her to marry either of them, as they were not of their village or Jola tribe. In their tradition, which continues today, the father “owns” his children and has every say about their futures until they marry. As she explained: “This is the tradition and it will continue until the end of the world.”

So, with the first man her father arranged, she had five children, and then he died. Then, as is the custom, she was given to marry her husband’s brother and she bore another five children. Then he died. After all this bad luck with men, she vowed to “retire” from ever being with another man, and has stayed true to this promise for many decades since. Her own daughters had gone to the metropolis of Dakar, Senegal to work, but when it was time for them to marry, the family arranged the marriages and have been back in their village ever since.

One of her sons is in the military and has served in Darfur as a peacekeeper. He is back now, living at the army barracks. All but one of her sons has gone through school (probably through the sixth grade), but none of the daughters did. The son who did not complete elementary school eventually became the village chief. Trying to get at what her actual age might be, I asked her what the age of her oldest child was. She replied: “I don’t know my own age, you think I’d know how old my child is?!”

I also asked her what did she think was the biggest difference between now and when she grew up (I was thinking she might talk about pre-independence and about technological change). She responded without hesitation: “Now the girls in town (the village) are all getting pregnant so young; before we never were.” As she sees it, they “hook up” at schools with other kids or even with the adults there. She described there is much promiscuity as well as rape. She also said that in the early days there was less sickness, though she wouldn’t call any of the disease people have now AIDS. Then she described a village ceremony when an NGO came with great fanfare distributing condoms. “They threw me a whole box of them and I threw it right back at them. What do you think I’m going to do with these condoms?” In all our conversation, the only word I understood without a translator was “condom.”