Sweeping With Fatou

Written on February 28th, 2010

So for the past week and a half I have completely packed up and emptied my house. The roof of my house has been torn off (think thatch piles and a stick frame) and replaced. Baay Waly cemented and white washed and today we just needed to sweep out the debris and I would be ready to set up shop. So like a good Gambian women in the making I grabbed my grass broom, bent at the waist and started sweeping. Pretty soon there after my youngest host sister Fatou, whose about 7 or 8, came over and wanted to help.
Fatou is a typical 7-8 year old in that she has a big personality/attitude, a sense that she knows how to do most everything and no attention to detail or attention span to do the job thoroughly/efficiently. Her sweeping strategy encapsulated all of that. Her "sweeping" was basically creating huge dust clouds whenever her broom happened to land with no methodology of how to best tackle the task. She also didn't really listen to my fragmented and grammatically in correct orders in Wolof and at one point she tried to tell me what to do. This is really not surprising behavior for any 8 year old but it nonetheless was an exercise of patience.
We must have looked amazing and crazy to an outsider. A cloud of dust following behind me as I firmly say in Wolof, "The outside, give and bring!"
When I really want to say, "Take this full dust pan outside, empty it and bring it back."
Instead of having any meaningful communication or teamwork we just continued as we were and eventually my house was clean.