Zakat in the Morning
On Friday my host mom unexpectedly offered to drive me to school. She’s never done that before, but with the temperature hovering around 85 degrees at 9 a.m., and I wasn’t about to say no. So I jumped into her old, black BMW (yes, my senegalese host mother drives a BMW) and we took off. About halfway there, she said, “est-ce que tu es pressée?” Are you in a hurry? I shook my head. “Bon,” she said, “alors nous allons faire une promenade.”
Now “faire une promenade” is a phrase I learned way back in my French 1 days, and according to the fine folks who put together Paroles: Beginning French, it means “to take a walk.” So by my haphazard translation, my host mom had told me Good, then we will take a walk.
What follows is proof that you can understand every word that’s said to you and still not have a clue what is going on. Because instead of “taking a walk,” we drove for a bit and then pulled over next to a roadside chicken salesman. [Side note: I just spent several minutes puzzling over whether there might be a more eloquent or less bizarre way to describe the career that is vending live chickens on the side of city streets, but there is not. And would we really want there to be anyway? I mean, really?]
So our friend the chicken salesman runs quickly to our car. Before I can figure out what’s going on, he’s lunged his hand through the open window and there are two live chickens dangling from it. The little guys are wiggling around, shedding tiny feathers in my lap and staring at me with serious, beady eyes. They keep hanging there as my host mom and the vendor launch into an animated discussion. All in Wolof of course, so I understand what’s happening about as well as the chickens that are blocking my entire field of vision.
After a few minutes of this, the chicken man withdraws his hand suddenly, taking my only non-Wolof-speaking company with him. My host mom pulls out a crisp 5000 franc bill ($10) and passes it out to him. In turn, he hands her one of the chickens, which she accepts calmly and deposits in the back seat. Without a glance back, she turns the ignition and begins to drive again.
Meanwhile on the seat behind me, the chicken stays totally still. I don’t know if it was how they had his feet and wings tied or if he was just terrified, but the thing literally didn’t struggle at all. It just pivoted its tiny head back and forth, surveying the beige leather interior design of its deathmobile.
So I’m already wondering how my host mom is going to kill our new companion, what she’ll cook him with, if we’ll eat him that night, when she pulls over suddenly again. I see her gesture to a homeless man begging across the street. He wheels over to us in his wheelchair. My host mom rolls down her window and, without saying a single thing, hands him the chicken. He mumbles some kind of thanks and we drive away.
“Mama,” I begin tentatively. “What just happened?”
“I’m giving alms,” she said simply. It’s a testament to the fact that I’ve learned the greater part of my French in Senegal that I know the word for alms (les aumones), but I do, and so for the first time that entire morning, I wasn’t confused anymore.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever talked much about my host mom’s religion, but like 95% of Senegalese, she’s Muslim. I mostly encounter her faith when I accidentally wander into our living room chattering about my day and find that she’s bent over in one of her five-times-daily prayers to Allah. But besides making your host daughter feel awkward praying toward Mecca, one of the other tenets of Islam is almsgiving, or Zakat.
So it’s zakat that I have to thank for my close encounter of a chicken kind. Who knew almsgiving could be so exciting?
Over and out from the land where “take a walk” means “buy a chicken to give to a poor person.” Paroles certainly never taught me that one…
