Religious Tolerance.. but not really

I was sitting around the bowl, and my Mom had asked me why I never go over to Drew’s house (who lives a couple of streets down) for tea in the afternoons. I told her that it’s not that I don’t want to go, I just forget that Americans that live in Ouakam often go there because I’m usually doing other things. She told me that Drew’s mom said I wasn’t nice because I came to tea once and didn’t come after that. Then she told me that the other students in the previous years would go there every day (which isn’t actually very accurate), and that Abi and I don’t because we spend too much time with our musician boyfriends with dreadlocks. My Dad mentioned how he saw Abi the other day and assumed that she was up to no good because she was with a “rastaman.” 

I felt a little bit taken aback at this and told them that only two of my close friends here have dreadlocks, and they’re actually really nice people. I reminded them how nice it was that Sous L’Arbre Acoustique organized a birthday party for me at Limpala and would be playing there. I mentioned how grateful I was to have found such great friends here. I told them that don’t smoke weed, and that they are some of the nicest people I’ve ever met, have huge hearts and they aren’t bad people. I could have been talking to myself though because it was as though they didn’t hear anything I said. The first thing my sister said was that she would never date a rasta man. I told her that one of my friends with dreadlocks was a Bayefall (a subculture of Islam), and my mom said that she would never let a bayfall in her house, because they’re bad. I didn’t know what to say to this, and it actually made me really upset that she was saying this about one of my good friends that she has never met. That she knew absolutely nothing about him, other than the fact that he has dreadlocks. She has no idea that he has a huge heart, that he doesn’t smoke, and that his family is absolutely wonderful. She doesn’t know or care that he gets sent around Europe and West Africa to play the djembé. All she sees is that he has dreadlocks, is a bayefall and therefore must be a bad person. I asked why she doesn’t like them, and she just said they have a bad reputation in Senegal.

This was an awkward situation because I cant really talk back to them either or have a different opinion because 1. I don’t want to create conflict with my family and 2. I’m not really supposed to not talk back to my elders or argue with them.

I am realizing being here how much of an open-minded society America is. I’m also used to having a very open relationship with my parents, but here it’s like I have to hide what I’m doing because there are things that they just don’t accept. I have different values than they do though, and from my point of view, their reactions say one thing but to them they say a completely different thing. I feel like sometimes with my family there isn’t much of a cultural exchange, because they aren’t very interested in my point of view on anything. They just tell me how it is like it’s black and white.

A few weeks ago Abi told her family that she was going out until about 1am, and when we go out we usually have to call our families to open the door to let us in cause we don’t have a key (it sucks). So when she got home at 5 in the morning she was caught off guard when her uncle curiously asked where she had been. She could have said she went dancing. She could have said she was at a friends house drinking tea. But instead, to cover up the fact that she was hanging out with dreaded bayefalls, she decided to tell her uncle that my aunt died and that’s why she was home at 5 am because I was crying all night and needed comforting. So then the following week, she calls me to tell me that I need to come over so that her family can give me their condolences. Which then I spent 20 minutes talking with her host brother about how my aunt had a terminal illness and that we knew It was coming… that it was hard on all the family… and he went on to tell me that when he heard my news, he cried and thought about his own fathers passing. Fml. We are both going to hell. The things you do for your best friends.

America is such a mixture of different cultures so it makes sense that we are so accepting of different ways of being and types of people. On the one hand, while over 90 percent of the population here is Muslim, they are very tolerant of Christians but I’m realizing not so much of other minorities. Culture and religion are very interconnected in Senegal. They happily accept Christians and Muslims and jews, but if you don’t believe in god they don’t really know where to put you. Also you can’t accept an idea if you can’t even register that it exists. Its like homosexuality. You can’t accept it if you haven’t yet acknowledged its existence.