Time for the Toubaab show

In Wolof, the word toubaab means foreigner, but is often used to refer to white people. I hear the word pretty often, with many different connotations. My favorite is every morning on our way to school, just outside the entrance to the campus, lives a girl about 5 years old. Every day we pass by her house she is standing outside, and will start chanting “Toubaab, Toubaab, Toubaab!” like how one would chant for chocolate or ice cream! She bends her knees to bounce up and down a bit with each yell, and also holds her hands above her head, opening and closing them like lobster claws. Pretty darn cute if you ask me. Other times, I hear it from men on the street trying to get my attention, “hello, toubaab!” not as cute. Or by street vendors trying to get me to stop and buy a necklace, some shoes, or some perfume (although to some of the guys in our group the vendors will yell, “hello pretty boy” “big boy” or “play boy” to get their attention). Anyway, we have started referring to those moments especially “toubaab” of us, or where we are even more clueless than normal, as “Toubaab Show”.

The Toubaab Show premiered after school the other day, when it was pouring down rain, and a group of four of us was trying to get home from school. Usually we walk the 25 or so minutes to our neighborhood, but the streets were almost completely flooded, the sides of the road incredibly muddy, and we had our school books with us, which we didn’t want to get wet. Thus, we decided to take a taxi for the first time. Taking a taxi in Senegal involves much more than it does in the States. Hailing one is easy for us, since we stand out just a little, but then you have to barter the cost with the driver in Wolof before getting in. Most of the time, the driver will ask for an inflated price since we are Toubaabs, but our group was told how much a taxi should cost from school to our neighborhood, so we felt all set to go! Stepping out to the street, we were already ankle deep in mud, but ready for our adventure, three cabs pull over to pick us up before we even raise an arm, and we lean in to talk to the first driver. We went through our Wolof greetings, and then asked for the price we were told was good, the cab driver laughed and started to pull away. No problem we thought, it isn’t as if another taxi won’t stop for us! We began to walk over to the second cab, when the first driver realized what we knew, which was that another taxi would easily take us where we were going. He went in reverse back to where we were standing, and agreed that the price we named was good; satisfied, but soaked, we climbed in.

We got to our neighborhood, and told the driver where he could drop us off. He pretended not to understand however, and stopped just where we were, in the middle of a busy street with 2 lanes in both directions, to let us out. We opened our doors to see another large puddle, but from the back seat it didn’t look very deep. Three of the four of us climbed out stepping gently on the puddle, and stepped to the side of the road. Our friend in the front seat, however, had a deeper pool of water waiting for her. The Toubaab Show had started. Hiking up her skirt, she stood up on the side of the car, and leaned forward to put the hand not holding her skirt on the roadblock a good 3 to 4 feet away. With her body almost completely stretched out, she realized that there was no way she could avoid the puddle, and what’s more, that she was a bit stuck. We alternated between offering her our arms, cheering her on, and laughing hysterically, before she finally jumped, landing right in the puddle, and hurried to join us on the side of the road. Looking back at the cab, we saw our drivers face almost in tears he was laughing so hard before he drove off. Thinking the battle was won, we began the walk to each of our houses about a block away, soon enough, however, we realized that we needed to cross the busy street, which was full of water, but only ankle deep. We waited for a lull in the traffic, and ran across at the shallowest point we saw.

We then had to cross another small street, which wasn’t as well paved, or drained. It was hard to tell that a street was even below the river that filled it. We walked along the “curb” standing on blocks varying distances apart, going along the street looking for a place to cross. After going back and forth three times, we found a place with a cement block in the middle of the street, and shallower water a bit past it, taking leaps and strides, we crossed one by one, all making it to the side of the road we needed to be on, shouting to each other and laughing the whole way. Exhilarated, we stopped to take a breath and realize what had just happened. It was in this moment that we looked around to see that not only had other pedestrians stopped in their tracks to watch us, but traffic had also stopped—each driver was looking over at us, and various workers, most notably the construction workers on the second floor of a nearby building, had stopped what they were doing, taken a seat and watched our ordeal of street crossing. Awesome. And we still had a block to go before we reached our houses. People began to go back to what they were doing, and we had caught our breath enough to keep going. Soaking wet, muddy, and still in a state of shock, we completed our walk without ordeal, but still managed to turn the head of everyone we passed by.

You might think that this is a river...

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but it's a street.