World

The kids are wearing pitched slippers, chasing a ball on a bumpy field or playing with a stick. They wear colorful T-shirts. The shirts are always the same, but they’re always clean. The little industrial waste ends up in some hole, and something gets recycled. When the local music shop takes the loudspeakers out all the town gathers to dance and follow the rhythm. The men have old mobile phones, like those we used to carry in the 90s, just voice calls, our smartphones are just bricks. Some shops sell random house appliances, right from the European 80s, from the north of the world. Men can have up to four wives, an average of ten sons and daughters, and they are all elderly at fifty. And then they die, a new page is rapidly turned. They’re Muslims. The whole family lives in the same house, up to fifty persons. The day is chaotic, they make out their living on waiting, relationship, communication. In the rooms, there are just decaying mattresses, no furniture, no shelves, no souvenirs, and no memories. This is Ziguinchor, Casamance, Senegal. When you get inside their houses, they hand you a plastic chair and some food, they want you to feel at home, to make you understand that blind waiting means eternal happiness, that western needs are small thing. The children crush you with a smile.