We went out for a home-hosted dinner on this night in Dakar. It was in the Medina area of town, and we wound up in a long parade of some sort getting there. It's largely a Muslim area and some group was hosting a religious meeting and we ended up in the vehicle line going the same way. 95 percent of Dakar residents are Muslims and mostly Sunni Muslims. The whole area was lively, noisy, and active but it also looked run down and depressed.

Our host family lived in a multi-level home with three generations. We met twelve or thirteen members of the family, so a large multi-family dwelling. In this family, they evidently just have one kitchen which was on the ground floor. We never made it upstairs to the rest of their house. You can see a photo of the home below.

Many people sat on the floor, but they had plenty of furniture, just not enough for all of them plus all of us. You can see some photos of the family below.

The "Mom" in the family cooked us dinner. We never got to see the kitchen, only the food. We had a one-dish dinner which was rice and fish with sweet potato, sweet peppers, cabbage, potatoes, carrots, and squash plus limes. Mom made the same for everyone and there was one large bowl for every four or five people to share. We all ate out of the same bowl, only using our right hands. (The left hand is used for going to the bathroom, but I don't know how the southpaws handled it.) I found it really messy and not very easy to do. We were supposed to scoop out a handful of food and roll it into a ball, just using one hand. I found the rice had quite a bit of liquid in it and that made each scoop very slippery to try and roll together into a ball to eat, but we managed to do it. You can see our dinner dish below.

Most everyone ate with their hands as you can see below. The woman with her back to us on the floor has her right hand pulling out a handful of food. The woman on the left is just going into the bowl for a handful. But you can notice that Grandma, next over, is using a spoon. We were offered spoons but we all used our hands like the locals.

Dessert was a fruit dish: bananas, grapes, tangerines, and pears. You can see a plate of fruit below.

We were also served baobab juice and hibiscus juice, both homemade. The baobab juice was like drinking a milkshake and the hibiscus was excellent too.

Lastly, we were served tea. It was a spiced Chinese tea and very bitter, but they put in enough sugar to overbalance it out.

It was a very good meal and a very slow meal. We were up to the challenge and got enough to eat. Plus, no one got sick, which is always a good thing.