'Wass'

'Wass' means 'to gut fish'.

I don't much like fish but I eat it because that is what we eat here. Sometimes you buy it from the fisherman and it is still breathing. When you get it from the market it is at least dead, but still very fish-like. Because of a run-in with the fish-gutting cartel back in March I have decided to gut my own fish and not hand over money to the fat woman who keeps a stock of young girls back behind the market stalls, taking far too much money and not doing any of the work herself.

So today I came back from market with 12 fish, some little ones and 4 big ones. They were very beautiful, pink-ish in colour with a bright purple fin (is that the word?) on the spine (do fish have spine?). But they had to be gutted so Badji, the hero of the neighbourhood (who not only removed frogs from my house when I first moved in but recently put out an electrical fire in the house next door to mine) said, "go and get a stool, a bowl of water and two knives. Here starts your 'wass' education".

So we perched on the ground behind Now's shop and he showed me how to pull out the little fins and the one under its chin, then get my hand inside its gills, pull out that gristly thing (this was the worst bit), then slit its stomach and pull out the guts. Dudu, Kine, Now, Samba,Binta and Ishmaela all gathered round to watch the education of this white girl who can't even gut fish and I closed my eyes and got my fingers in and did the deed.

Then the flies came. Big and fat and vibrating, they landed heavy on the fish and me and the guts and Badji didn't seem to even notice they were there but they made me feel sick and I wished I had a little girl there who would bring a branch and swat them for me. After 12 fish I felt positively sick and had to go home and drink tea and listen to The Archers Omnibus (thank god the soap box derby's over).

But it means I am now initiated, I am now a functional woman in this society, and I can now prepare my own fish. It will be a while before I am able to do it with my eyes open though.

Badji and Ishmaela, my guardian, came to help me cook dinner. Badji, it turns out is a whizz at cooking. I brougt in the rice to pick out the stones and he said he would do it. Ishmaela said that rice was the job of a woman and he shouldn't touch it. But Badji is a good Casamance boy and proud of being able to treat rice in the right way so he sat and picked out the grit (this is what he is doing in the picture, Badji is the one on the left). I cut the onions and made a tomato and onion sauce, as well as fried some butternet squash. The fish was lovely, very sweet and light. We were 8 of us for dinner, all around a bowl outside Now's shop, some of us balancing on gas bottles, some on little benches, the bowl on the sandy ground. As people came to the shop to buy bread for dinner, we took it in turns to serve since Now was eating. This is what constitutes a dinner party in Senegal, and the best place ot be on a Saturday night with no plans.