How I met Myrum

June 2010
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June 4, 2010, 12:33 pm
Filed under: Village Life

Myrum comes to our house every night to watch television. Well, it probably isn’t the television-watching scenario you’re imagining. For starters, it isn’t really in a house. There aren’t any comfy sofas. Actually, there isn’t any furniture at all, save for a rickety stand that elevates the TV to an appropriate level for its audience, seated in rows on a woven plastic mat on the sand under a tall and noble neem tree. An extension cord snakes its way across the yard and into the house, connecting the television to its power source and connecting my Senegalese family and friends to the outside world.

I look forward to these times when the neighborhood comes over to watch the overacting skills of a Spanish language telenovela dubbed into French. It was during these breezy desert nights in the north of Senegal that I came to know Myrum.

She always comes and greets the family quickly, her baby strapped to her back with a colorful tattered cloth: the traditional way. Those usual Pulaar greetings are clipped as she maneuvers her tiny baby into her lap and finds her place on the mat. I never talked to her much, but it didn’t take long to realize that these shows which enthrall her are also completely incomprehensible to her. Myrum doesn’t understand a word of them, because she doesn’t speak French.

In Senegal, there are dozens of local languages – guttural Wolof is dominant. There’s the language of the laamba wrestlers, Sereer, and the lovely and singing Pulafuta in the South. But in the north, it’s Pulaar that is taught in homes across the region. French is the not-so-official “official” language of the country and what children learn in the schools. So, if you meet someone who can’t speak French, you can logically conclude that they either didn’t attend school, or left at an early age. Even now, this is all too common. In Pulaar country, it isn’t unusual for some boys to leave their studies to join the herders in the fields, and the girls who leave, sometimes as early as 12, help with the housework, or for their shiny new arranged marriage. This is undoubtedly the case with Myrum.

As Myrum sits, focusing on Marina, the glamorous telenovela heroine, I am focusing on her. In seeing her, I can’t stop myself from viewing my life in relation to hers. And what type of life does she lead? In my limited knowledge, I do know that she lives with her husband’s family. She just had her first child, who accompanies her everywhere, as she goes to the market to buy rice and fish or precariously picks her way around thorn bushes, following the sandy path to our house. On the television, Myrum absorbs the images of paved streets patrolled by new cars, swimming pools, fancy homes filled with furniture. On some level, these sights are familiar to me. But chances are the only paved road that Myrum has ever seen is the crumbling national “highway” that skirts our town. How does Myrum feel about these discrepancies? How does she feel about going home to her husband after another night of seeing Marina kiss Ricardo?

I watch Myrum laughing and saying her goodbyes to my family as the final scenes of the show play out, and I can’t feel sorry for her. And she wouldn’t want me to. As far as I can tell, she is comfortable here on the edge of the desert. She knows this town well and everyone knows her. It’s all she’s ever known. What more could she want when she has all her loved ones in one place? After all, even seemingly perfect Marina has problems.

In the end, we’re just two girls from very different backgrounds who somehow ended up sitting together on that simple woven mat. Maybe we can learn from each other, but I feel lucky, because I’ve already learned so much from Myrum.