Everything was dark. But within the space that held me, someone was
knocking, rattling a feeble door. Two males voices spoke in the curt
intones of Wolof. Then, “Cho-Ro!
Com. Com.” More talking. “Cho-Ro?”

Having established that I was no longer dreaming, that the blinking of my eyes
produced absolute darkness either way, I asked myself: Where am I?

“Cho-ro?” And who the hell is Cho-Ro?

Except for an intermittent rooster’s call and the muffled voices, the silence weighed heavy as the darkness.

I sat up in an attempt to orient myself and met my mosquito net. I’m in the village. The village of Nder.

On all fours, I scoured my foam mattress for something to illuminate my
surroundings. I struck gold and with the flick of a switch, my LED
headlamp cast a hazy glow on my room. My room.

Long curtains lined the walls. The bed’s headboard was barely visible under slender
glasses, crockery, an old cassette player, and tchotchkes that ran the
gamut from faded plastic flowers and crude animal figurines to pictures
of marabouts set in frames. Stacked at my side were two straw-stuffed
pillows covered with ornate cases of brown crushed velvet or
velour—I’ve never known the difference nor liked the feel. I continued
my inspection and a cracked mirror refracted the light emanating from
my hand.

“Cho-Ro?”

What was this Cho-Ro business?

The previous night slowly materialized. I have become all too familiar
with total unfamiliarity and the accompanying symptoms—amnesia,
bewilderment, an inability to move, speak or think—and am now able to
assure myself, in moments of absolute perplexity, that I have not lost
my mind altogether. We had arrived just after dusk. Furthering the
acclimation problem. I had greeted people—lots of people—by
lamplight. They reposed supine on large grass mats at the center of
what I presumed was the family compound. Hardly any of them spoke
French. Except one brother—a student home for the Easter break. He
had taken me into my room with what felt like the entire family
trailing at our feet. I was to eat (my second dinner of the day) and
then sleep because I was tired. Yes, I had said. I am tired, but
please, help me write down the names of the family members and some key
Wolof phrases. I whipped out my trusty pocket notebook, my closest
companion these days, and had my brother spell aloud the first and last
names of every family member. As I copied each name, I had tried to
envision the family tree, but two notebook pages later, realized that
this family was a veritable village in and of itself and that my
brother did not differentiate between males and females. By
practically every name, even those I recognized as distinctly female, I
found myself writing grandfrere or petite frere (big brother or little
brother) and I was certain that those I had greeted were almost
entirely female. I had been given a name. The comparatively
light-skinned woman with the doeish eyes who had prepared my dinner (a
delicious medley of yassa and deep fried hardboiled eggs steeped in
oil) was my namesake. And her name was….

I now felt around for
my pocket notebook and desperately flipped through months of haphazard
notes. Sure enough, the first item under “La Famille Diaw” was “Thioro
(Cho-roe) Diaw—moi.” And then below, “when called answer nam not wau.”


“Thioro?”

“Nam.”

“Ahh Thioro. Com com.” A door creaked and I scrambled out of bed.

A section of the curtains was pulled back and two young men loomed in the
doorway, their slender figures silhouetted by what little daylight had
broken. I recognized one as my French-speaking brother and consulted
my notebook: “Ousaynou (Oo-say-noo) Diaw—frere.”

“Ousaynou,” I crooned, my voice thick with sleep.

“Thioro. Tu as bien dormi?”

“Wau wau.”

He introduced me to his friend. So they chill with their friends before
the sun has even risen? I looked at my watch for the first time: 6:30
am.

“Thioro. Tu voudrais faire du jogging?”

I guess I had said that, hadn’t I. In coming to Nder, I had decided to be
resolute with myself about moving in the cool mornings as I had heard
the heat of the day rendered one immobile. My brother had volunteered
to show me a good route.

“Ahh wau. Donne-moi un moment pour changer mes vetements.”

“D’accord. Thioro.”

We wove our way around a series of mud huts, chickens and goats milled
about, pecking the ground and bleating dolefully, respectively. At the
village’s edge was the road we had come in on the night before and we
now followed its wide path, the deep sand giving way to packed dirt. A
freshly constructed salmon and aquamarine monstrosity hulked opposite
the village, its curious buttresses, fanning out from a conical roof,
caught the early morning light. I recognized the structure immediately
as I had seen it, in nearly exact replication, in the villages visited
over spring break, villages at the opposite corner of the country.

Ousaynou confirmed that it was indeed Nder’s own Cas des Plus Petits—a President
Wade initiative to strengthen early childhood development by building
identical and incongruous nursery schools in rural villages throughout
the country. Nder’s had yet to be completed.

After the Cas de
Plus Petits, all abodes vanished and the fields of Nder stretched out
before us. Prior to the group’s arrival in Nder, when we had talked
about “the fields of Nder,” I had allowed my northeasterner’s
sensibilities get the better of me and had foolishly envisioned verdant
plains. But as I took in the fields of Nder for the first time, I
found that they were little more than the sandy Sahel of North Africa
cut with narrow irrigation trenches. Low-lying patches of green dotted
a beige landscape. Bushes resembling large nests of thorny tumbleweed
acted as fences.

The silence had been overtaken by the spirited early morning twittering of birds. Taken from the pages of a
Dr. Seus book, spindly little trees bearing a fruit I later learned was
nothing more than big green sacs with a milkweedy centers also grew
along the roadside, and small birds shot from one to another, diving
and swooping with a familiar agility. Swallows! The absolutely
unmistakable motions of swallows—no different in Northern Africa than
in Northern New Hampshire. How amazing that my favorite birds, like
me, can exist in two seemingly disparate locals, one would think…my
internal musings were interrupted:

“Et maintenant, nous pouvons
courir.” A command or suggestion (with Ousaynou, the line was always a
bit unclear), I could not tell, but was tempted to resist. For some
reason, however, I nodded.

With a little kick similar to that of
a long jumper at the start of his turn, Ousaynou took off. Hating
myself, I followed. His lithe body moved effortlessly, his long legs
bounded in the truest sense, hardly making contact with the ground. I
tried to match his movements, his pace was gentle enough for me to keep
up, but my feet were too heavy, my limbs too short, and my gimpish
movements utterly unsightly. He moved upward and forward, and I, side
to side, favoring the left with its stronger leg. I tried to bound and
almost killed myself in the process, especially when the desert’s deep
sand encroached on the dirt road. Five minutes later, I called it
quits. I looked for an excuse, then attempted to explain the truth: I
was ashamed of the way I ran. Ousaynou gave me a quizzical look, but
we resorted to a brisk walk, stopping every now and then so I could
peer at the big irrigation channels that intersected the road or
examine a pump. I would ask about particular crops and Ousaynou,
rather than give me a name, would sidestep a trench and pick me a leaf
or a fruit. We returned home an hour later, my arms encircling a
seeming cornucopia of Nder’s produce.