I find that while being abroad the ability to laugh at myself and the situations I find myself in is invaluable. For instance, the other day I came home about an hour before breaking fast and started to help my family prepare the meal. I was bragging about how good I’ve become at spreading butter which my mom took as an opening to suggest that I make pancakes for the family. Having previously discussed her love for pancakes I had already written down a recipe and so I started to tell her the ingredients I would need. Everything was going smoothly until I came across the word baking powder which I didn’t know in French. I spent the next twenty minutes trying to explain what baking powder is to no avail. Frustrated, I abandoned my attempts and continued to spread the butter in silence. Shortly after my mom received a phone call from her brother who was at the airport leaving Senegal after a month long visit. I had met him my first week here and had since seen him three times. Leaving Senegal when he was 19, he bounced around Portugal, Italy, Spain, France and finally Germany for twenty years. He’s one of those guys whose look alone commands respect. He has the build of a ten year old, has dreads down to his feet, and his eyes look as if maybe they’ve seen too much. The looks of Jar Jar Binks, the mind of Yoda and the height of R2D2. Anyways, he’s married to a German woman who doesn’t speak French or Wolof. To this point I had assumed that Mama had never had a real conversation with her sister in law. Oh how I was wrong. To my astonishment Mama switches over to English and says to the German woman, “I’m just sitting here with my son. We’re making pancakes tonight but first we need to find baking powder. Levure chimique.” She winked, smiled and continued in her perfect English, leaving me baffled. All I could do was laugh.

However the ability to refrain from laughing also has come into handy lately. One of Mama’s nephews has come to stay with us for a while. He’s my age and plays basketball so naturally we hang out a lot. I try to share everything I have with my family as much as possible and lately he been using my ipod. The other night we were across the street at the boutique which sits directly next to the mosque. It was a Friday, a holy day in the Muslim faith, and the mosque was packed. There were at least a hundred bodies outside of the mosque and everyone was in the process of completing the eight o’clock prayer. As we were waiting for the vender to weigh out the millet we were buying, Ibo (short for Ibrahim) leans in and asks me in a whisper, “what does it mean I got hoes.” I didn’t understand at first what he was saying because his pronounced “hoes” more like “hews” but after a second it registered. He had heard Ludacris recite this line time after time and now, in the middle of a silent prayer, in a hushed tone, found it the right time to ask about it. It was everything I could do not to burst into laughter. The next day he asked me what “making the bedrock meant.” I gotta find a new type of music to listen to. Maybe some nice, lyric-less, instrumentals.