Today feels very, very familiar, a little like Thanksgiving.
Ramadan is over (the moon told us last night.), and today we celebrate Korité.

Morning. The family communes, sleepy-eyed, on the terrace, where Maam pours each of us heaping portions of chilled lait-caillé and steaming millett.

Women don their pagnes and the men their bubus. Heads were shaved or tressed last night (quick diversion tactics saved my scalp...my fine blond hair tends to react rather wimpily to the braiding process).

I sit with the other teenaged and twenty-something women, peeling and dicing onions, carrots, turnips, and garlic. There are no cutting boards. I dice three onions, a carrot and a turnip in my hand.

I spy a bloodied chunk of paper the size of and shape of several bowling balls wrapped for christmas. Fresh sheep.

Lunch is an overflowing platter of color. Pickles, eggs, bright green spicy peppers, crimson sausages, water chestnuts (to which "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" (my new favorite book) just paid a lovely tribute.), onions and garlic, the afore-mentioned sheep, and as always, a bed of rice.

Youssour Ndou (famous Senegalese singer) and glass bottles of cool Coca Cola accompany the afternoon. Alia and I feel festive and buy the family cookies from a nearby boutique.

and now... a pause. The world catches its breath and examines its too-full stomach. I'm reminded of the post-Thanksgiving feast time when the family disperses...some to wash dishes, some to take walks, some to fall asleep in their mothers laps, some to sit silently and watch.
(...and some to quickly document the experience.)