Visiting with Tidiane's Oldest Sister

Our reader Tidiane invited us to have a meal at his sister's house. His sister is a medical doctor at the local hospital. She does clinical studies of Aids patients and helps determine treatment for them. She has four children. Her husband's job takes him to the U.S. for several months each year, and he was in the U.S. at the time of our visit.
We did not get a very good picture of her.

The next photo shows the hospital.

The doorway to Tidiane's sister's house is on the right in the following picture. She has a garage that opens onto this street.

The following are photos inside her house. As you can tell, even doctors do not live really well in Senegal! The furniture was good quality and looked nice. The building was not up to American codes. There was hot water, but the heater had to be turned on in advance of needing the hot water. The toilet facilities were clean and serviceable; they were very spartan.

This is the kitchen. It is very small with little cabinet space. There is no dishwasher or garbage disposal. These two ladies work for Tidiane's sister. They are cooking the meal for us.

The next pictures are Tidiane's sister's children.

The little boy in the light colored, stripped shirt had a blue ink pen and was drawing pictures in a book for us to see. When we were not watching, he drew on the white leather couch with that pen! As you can tell from this, and from the photo below, kids are the same everywhere.

They do have a television. This is the show that was on, but as you can see, the reception is not very good.

It was Saturday, but the two younger boys still had to go to the Muslim school. Here they are dressed for the school in their traditional clothes. You can tell by their faces that they were not really happy about leaving to go to school!

This is the dish of food that was prepared for us. It is fish, sweet potatoes, onions, carrots, and rice. This plate was put in the center of the coffee table, and 8 of us ate out of it. We each had our own spoon, and we had bottled water to drink. It was delicious food.