Smelling Senegal

A certain father of mine asked me about the smells in Senegal and I thought I would take a stab at that blog post.  The smells are one thing in Senegal that are everywhere and not always good.  The first true smells that I encountered were the burning of garbage and the smell of dried fish, both smells that I could do without.

The smell of garbage burning is pungent and accompanied by smoke as well.  You can catch a whiff as you drive by in a car or it can meander over in village as well.  The most intense component of this smell is that of burning plastic which is unlike anything I've smelled before, worse than burning rubber on the highway.  The other smell that I encountered soon after my arrival in Senegal came while walking through the outdoor market in Thiès.  In the markets here they sell everything, fresh food, canned foods, clothing, tailors set up shop, brooms, knives, mattresses, buckets.  You name it, it's there.  The smell of the foods, fresh from wherever are intense.  The fruits and vegetables are not always in the finest condition so there's that smell.  But the fish have a sharper smell.  Fresh fish is okay.  Flies buzz around their dead bodies but in general they just smell like the ocean, salty.  Dried fish, cured fish, on the other hand are a whole other beast (metaphorically speaking of course).  That odor truly smells like something crawled up somewhere and died, many many years ago.  It's a rotten, salty, fishy smell and the taste is even worse.  Luckily it has only been in the bowl once and it was offered to me, I tried it and immediately told them the truth.  Thank you but no thanks.  Koomba seemed fine with that...no big deal.

The other market smells include the roasting of peanuts on the street.  They roast them here in wide bowls in sand.  The smell is that of burning sand.  Roasted peanuts here aren't what we are used to back home.  Yes they are roasted, but not according to the standards of Planters.  Lightly roasted, would be putting it mildly.  There's also the smell of freshly baked bread, although the bread itself, known as machine bread, isn't good to eat necessarily, the smell of bread baking anywhere is a pleasure for the nose. Beignets cooking is also a good smell but that of oil frying rather than something baking. Again, you can't smell the actual product but the smell of sweet dough frying in oil is not something to be ignored in Senegal.  And if you can get your mitts (the right one in particular) around a millet beignet you are in like flynn.  Those are the whole wheat equivalent of any good, healthy doughnut.

Outside of the market there are the smells from the village.  The most perfumed of those is the soap, Madar, that they use for everything.  They use the same soap for dishes, laundry, and bathing and it has so much perfume and incense that you might think you are in a Bath and Body Works in the States.  A smell I had the good fortune of getting whiff of in village was cooked lizard.  This is not your ordinary lizard, but rather a very large lizard that people in Karamoho So considered a delicacy.  I considered it the opposite and politely declined eating it after they swung it's dead and decapitated body/head at me one night a few weeks ago.  The smell of that beast cooking puts the dried fish to shame.

The smells on the road are what I find the most interesting.  I encountered these recently when I started running (I didn't have the Senegal culturally appropriate clothing at the beginning of my two months so I only recently was able to run in village).  The general air is smoggy with a constant smell of trees burning or exhausting burning.  The trucks that pass by on the main roads are incredibly overloaded with who knows what and they produce an exhaust that could knock a small child on their feet.  There is also the occasionally smell of street pizza.  I've seen more dead dogs and dead cats in Senegal than I've seen in my lifetime.  When they are dead here, on the road, they are really dead.  Intestines, blood, and fur smeared across the side of the road, and if it is fresh, it is rank.  Not something I would want to run by everyday.  But there is a silver lining.  Sometimes, on those early morning runs I've taken, or walking along a road an Al Halm (a large white vehicle that takes can take 15+ people) passes with the best perfumed smell.  Senegalese people often douse themselves in perfume and ironically enough usually men where women's perfume and women men's.  Don't know why and I'm not sure if they realize it, but maybe they are onto something.  That is a smell that I am grateful for whenever I run past a dead dog.