Pictures!:
1) Me at Manantali for July 4th eating a giant pig's leg
2) Suruku
3) Suruku's ear wound (more on that later)
4) Amadou has since upgraded his bike to a moto, on which he can fit 150 chickens and guinea fowl
5) View from dining room of Hotel Mande, Bamako
6) Me at Mbamakan's wedding with her two sons and brother's daughtor
7) The other girl getting married that day - wearing whiting face makeup since Malians think lighter skin is more beautiful
8) Mbamakan in wedding gown with some random child
9) the wedding at the mayor's office. don't get overstimulated
10) the happy couple, with his Sonrai relatives in the background. Malians don't know how to smile for pictures...
6/27
Well it’s certainly rainy season again! Having been through all the seasons once now, I think I’ve decided that rainy season is my least favorite season here. Cold dry season is of course my favorite, closely followed by hot dry season. Hot season was certainly hot, but it wasn’t nearly so bad as I’d been led to expect. I don’t mean that it wasn’t as hot, just that the heat really didn’t bother me like I thought it would. Sure, you sweat 24 hours a day and have to dash between shady spots during the day, but once you sit yourself down in a nice shady spot there’s plenty of time to relax, chat, read, drink tea, and everyone else does the same. Plus bragging about how hot it is and who’s site is hotter never seems to get old. Though it was too hot to sleep inside at night, I rather enjoyed sleeping outside for a few months and the lack of moisture meant that I never had to worry about a midnight rainstorm disturbing my slumber. Not only that, but with the sky crystal clear every night and no light pollution, the stars are simply dazzling and grace à my star chart (left over from the Observational Astronomy course I took senior year, and much more useful in Mali than it was in New York) I have a lot of fun identifying constellations and individual stars and planets. On a clear night during cold season it’s even possible to see both the North Star and Southern Cross at the same time, which is impossible just a bit farther north or south of here.
As I was saying though, rainy season is here, and that means mud. Not just rain mud, which is everywhere, but nyegen water mud. Since there’s no sewer system of course, the water people use for washing (themselves, dishes, clothes, babies, sheep, bikes, motos, etc.) runs out of their concessions through drainage holes in the walls made for the purpose and into the streets. Whereas in dry season this would quickly disappear, now it creates perpetual muck pools filled with rotting bits of food and other miscellaneous nastiness. Some of these pools stretch from one concession wall across the road to the other concession, so that you can only avoid the mud by carefully-chosen steps. Consequently I’ve had to stop riding my bike around town, since the tires inevitably pick up this mud and fling it onto my clothing.
The solution is soak pits – that is, a covered pit filled with rocks, with PVC pipe catching the water running off the wash areas and channeling it into the pit, where it can soak into the ground without making a muddy pool in the street (the muddy pools also provide handy breeding-grounds for Malaria-carrying mosquitoes, so soak pits are important for health as well as aesthetic reasons). There are a few soak pits around town, but these are mostly uncovered and filled with sludge that prevents water from being absorbed. It seems likely to me that at some point an NGO came by and told the townspeople to dig them, but didn’t explain why or how to maintain them, so once they stopped working the townspeople lost interest. Fixing that problem will have to be one of my primary goals for the coming year.
Another problem unique to rainy season is that all the trash, animal dung, child dung (they love to greet me on my way to work while popping a squat in the field in front of my concession), etc. that’s been lying around on the ground for the past eight months without rain to carry it away suddenly becomes mobile. Inevitably a lot of it ends up in the groundwater, or washed into wells directly, which means it’s water-borne disease season. Speaking of which, I’m now being treated for amebic dysentery. After testing positive for dormant ameba cysts I’d been on the lookout for it, and decided on Tuesday that not only do I have it now (active amebas causing dysentery), but I’ve had it countless times over the past few months. It comes and goes whenever my immune system takes a hit, and I didn’t identify it before because its symptoms have thankfully been mild. Since bad cases can cause an abscess in the liver which can then drain into the lungs and cause the victim to cough up foul black fluid, I’ve gotten off pretty easily. So far.
Saturday, July 5th
Well it’s just after American Independence day, which I’ve spent here in Manantali. Getting here from Bamako on the 3rd was a bit of an adventure, involving 14 hours of travel. Someone recommended Gana Transport for the Bamako – Kita leg since they are on time and professional, at least compared to other Malian bus companies. Well that doesn’t mean much. To be fair, it didn’t leave too late once the bus arrived in the station. It was slightly hilarious when it arrived, as nobody could figure out how to open the door. For a good 20 or 30 minutes. I’m not sure how it could have been so difficult, considering the driver was inside the vehicle. Eventually they succeeded in opening the door, at which point all the waiting Malians stormed on board, despite the company’s protestations that they would call people in the order of when tickets were bought. So we had nearly last choice for seats (being much less accustomed to muscling our way through crowds than your average Malian), but we got good seats anyway. Really any bus ride like that, where the bus has windows that open and the other passengers allow you to open them, is a good ride by default. Most Malian buses are designed for air conditioning, so the windows don’t open, but I’ve never been on a bus where the a/c actually worked. If there are windows, it’s often a fight to keep them open, since most Malians think that wind gives you Malaria. Well anyway before we’d left Bamako it became apparent that something was very wrong with the bus’ transmission, but we left all the same. Sure enough the bus broke down on the road, although through some incredible stroke of luck this occurred just outside of Kita, so we were able to walk the few remaining kilometers into town. The journey from Kita to Manantali, in a bache with wooden benches instead of seats for 4 or 5 hours on a bad dirt road, was less eventful.
Monday, July 7th
Arriving at Manantali in the middle of the night is an impressive experience. After traveling for hours through the total darkness of deep-brousse Mali, you come over the peak of a mountain to look out over the small but well-lit city, walled in by mountains on two sides and the giant dam that holds back the giant lake of the Bafing reservoir and provides power to Mali, Senegal, and Guinea, and is Manantali’s raison d’être. The PC has a house there, which is unremarkable except in its location right on the Bafing River (downstream from the dam/reservoir). I’d been really looking forward to seeing hippos in the wild, which hang out in said river, often right in front of the house. Unfortunately the water level was too high, so all the hippos were off hanging out farther downstream somewhere – of the 42 of us there, only two or three managed to catch a glimpse of one, early on the 6th, before a fisherman’s boat scared it off.. This did, however, make it easy to keep our promise to the medical staff no to have any “hippo accidents” over the holiday, hippos being the second most deadly animal to humans in Africa, second only to elephants.
The other thing the house is famous for is monkeys, and they did not disappoint. During the day they would simply hang out in the trees around the house, and seemed to pay about as much attention to us as we were paying to them. At night we slept outside in our mosquito-net tents, and the monkeys seemed to get a little braver, sitting in the trees just over our heads and calling out to each other in that distinctive monkey “han! han!” Each of the three nights I slept there I woke up in the middle of the night and enjoyed laying there listening to them for a while as I slowly drifted back to sleep.
The 4th itself was fun, we spent the day hanging out, swimming in the hippo-free river, and roasting an entire pig (quartered and relieved of its head and guts) in a pit we’d dug for the purpose. One of the volunteers even produced a bottle of Tennessee Whiskey Barbecue Sauce, that had left Tennessee with his son months ago, hung out in Italy for a few months, before finally flying through Casablanca and into Bamako when the son came to visit. We even managed to restrain ourselves enough that most everyone got a taste of it. I will never take a bottle of good, authentic barbecue sauce for granted again!
Wednesday, July 9th
Now a while ago I was explaining the things that change during rainy season, and I’d like to continue that now. Apart from the mud, the other thing I really don’t like about rainy season is the bugs. During cold and hot dry seasons bugs are virtually nonexistent, the exceptions being a certain amount of flies, which are omnipresent except at night when they are replaced by the occasional scorpion. As rainy season arrives though, the bugs more than make up for all the party time they’ve missed. Flies now come in hordes all the time and for no particular reason – in dry season they only come in hordes whenever I thought the word “mango!” which, unfortunately, is hard to avoid while eating one. Any small abrasion or cut that I fail to cover up provides a focal point for their swarming, which can be quite gross. It’s worse for my dog though. Somehow all Malian dogs get wounds on their ears during rainy season. Or perhaps they get them all the time, but they’re only significant during rainy season. How they get them I don’t know; fight with another dog? Fight with a Malian? My host dad says they just appear, without cause. A small wound is harassed incessantly by flies (it’s not like the dog can go into a screened-in house for refuge), which causes the dog to scratch it incessantly. Thus a scabbed-over wound becomes an open one, and a small wound becomes a bigger one, from the dog’s own scratching. Since the lack of flies at night allows the wound to scab over, the process repeats every day.
Apart from the flies, the spiders are also back, and setting up homes everywhere, especially in mine. And not just little web-spinners, but large tarantula-style ones too. Apparently they prefer to live in holes in the ground, but once the rain fills these up they’re left with few options but indoors. The same is true of snakes, they tell me; so far I haven’t seen any. My host father tells me we don’t have to worry about snakes at site since we have a lot of pigs (thanks to the non-Muslim Bobo population) unlike the rest of Mali, and pigs love to eat snakes. At first I though this was absurd, but I watched some of “The Lonesome Dove” a couple weeks back, and they also mentioned something about pigs eating snakes, so now I’m just skeptical.
I like to complain, but really rainy season’s not all bad. For one thing the temperatures are much more moderate, and can even be cool during and after a rainstorm. Rainstorms themselves are also fun – like they were when I was a kid but more so, since there’s no real shelter (that is, lace where I can go and forget that it’s raining) so I’m forced to enjoy the entire storm. My tin roof makes sure I know the second the rain starts and stops, and provides soothing white noise for the duration. My favorite rainy season activity is sitting just inside my door and watching the rain and reading, while sipping hot hibiscus tea.
Rainy season is also gardening season. I’m no expert – my sister can tell you how close I came to starving a cactus in my apartment in Boston, and that was with the help of two roommates. I’m having much better luck here, and though I’ve only yet tried moringa trees, I hope to eventually make a herb/vegetable garden, with tomatoes, basil, mint, baobab, moringa, and maybe a cucumber or two.
A few weeks back, after the first really huge rain, we had a couple of days of biblical plague of termites. This is a strange thing to list under “reasons rainy season is cool,” I know, but I enjoyed it. It was surreal – they go into “migrate!” mode and sprout wings, flying around frantically. During the day you can’t take two steps without having to dodge a few. Eventually they land somewhere and shed their wings, going into “run around aimlessly!” mode. Consequently the chickens go nuts running around eating them, as do the lizards. Since they can’t keep up with the sheer number of the bugs, the ants also have a field day, rallying the troops and dragging termite bodies (alive or dead) off into their mounds. I’ve never seen so many critters; birds, reptiles, and insects, all running around in their own unique but equally frantic way. True, my door frame has been chewed apart, but that happened before this rainy season arrived, I think. It’s less fun at night, when they swarm toward any source of light including headlamps, which makes going to the bathroom interesting: either you do it in the dark or you multitask, constantly swatting them away with one hand. I haven’t yet seen it, but my host dad tells me that they’ll soon be available in the market by the bucketful, and when fried are quite tasty. Believe it or not I’m looking forward to that – they’re high in protein, which is otherwise hard to come by. The collection method is simple, and follows the headlamp-in-the-nyegen principle: you leave a light on with a bucket of water underneath. They fly to the light, land, shed their wings, and fall into the bucket to drown.
While on the subject of bugs and lights, there’s one thing I forgot to mention under the “things I don’t like about rainy season,” and that’s the blister beetles. I’m not sure they’re rightly called “beetles,” since they appear to be in the hymenoptera family along with wasps and ants, and they’ve got large, wasp-like wings. They’re about ¾ to an inch in length, and also like to swarm around lights, such as headlamps. They secrete an acidic substance that causes a blister to form when it comes into contact with skin. If one of these bugs lands on you, you have to gently blow it off and hope it didn’t smear its poison on you anyway, which it probably did. The blister itself contains the acidic fluid, so if you pop it the blister will just spread. They present quite a problem at dinnertime – in order to see what you’re eating when the moon isn’t out, you must use a flashlight – but that attracts them both toward your face and your food, and you definitely don’t want to actually swallow one.
What I like most about rainy season though are the clouds. Either they’re far more impressive here than they are back home, or (more likely) I just notice them more since I’m outside all the time. Huge, billowing towers of cumulus are my favorite, with solitary black/grey rain clouds in the distance, blurry grey nothingness slanting down to the ground in the wind that always accompanies these clouds, announcing their presence to even the most oblivious observer just before the rain starts.
Tuesday, July 15
Well I surprised even myself just now. Really it was a long time in the making so “surprise” is a poor description, but I certainly crossed a line anyway. I was making scrambled guinea fowl eggs for lunch – with onion, le Vache qui Rit (the Laughing Cow) cheese, and cayenne pepper – and as usual was cracking my eggs into a tea glass separately in case one of them was bad. Also as usual I found a little fetus in each of the three eggs I cracked – just a little whitish-pinkish blob floating next to the yolk. Now months ago when guinea fowl eggs first came into season, I’d have thrown out the whole thing. However since I find at least a little fetus in around four in every five guinea fowl eggs I crack, if not more, I got over this stage quickly and resorted to just picking the fetus out and discarding it, cooking the rest. However this is difficult to do without losing half the egg, since they’re embedded in it and egg whites don’t separate easily – it’s like picking bits of shell out of the egg, but harder since they’re actually embedded in the whites. Often I’d attempt to scoop the fetus out and end up losing most of the egg-white for my troubles. Well today as usual I set about picking them out, but perhaps because I was using a fork (to keep my last clean spoon for later use) it was particularly annoying, so I gave up. I scrambled them in with all the rest. After all it’s protein, and I need all I can get on my diet of starch, starch, and more starch. I feel, intellectually, that I should be disgusted with myself, but frankly I’m not. Now one might ask why I don’t use chicken eggs – they’re bigger, easier to crack, and almost never come with fetuses, and the answer is of course that they’re more expensive – more than twice the price of guinea fowl eggs, at the moment. Now the price itself doesn’t bother me so much – I can afford it – but I feel really guilty buying chicken eggs since people always ask me, frowning as if I’ve been cheated, why I didn’t buy guinea fowl eggs for cheaper (GF eggs are 5/200 CFA (about 45 cents) while chicken eggs are 2/200 CFA). I could of course reply “haha! Because I’m a rich American and I scoff at your guinea fowl eggs!” but I spend a lot of time trying to discourage this image, though admittedly with little success.
Since the concession’s emptied out over the past couple weeks, I’ve been able to perform a bit of an experiment. One of the things that took some getting used to as a man in Mali was my role in housework – to be precise, I don’t have a role. My host mother washes my clothes, cooks my food, washes my dishes, and pulls all of the well water I need for bathing, filling my salidaga, washing my bike, etc. When my host mother isn’t around or is busy, one of the kids (be they 8 years old or 22) does it. At first I tried to resist. Well, okay I was happy to let them do my laundry – washing clothes by hand is hard work, and they’re much better at it than I am. I should add that I draw the line at underwear, which I wash myself with leftover water during my bucket baths; i.e. I do it on the sly. At first I tried insisting that I was perfectly capable of pulling my own water – in fact I can pull it much faster than Adjara, the 8 year old – but to no avail. Most of the time all I have to do is start walking the twenty steps from my front door to the well with a bucket in my hand and someone will run over, take it from me, and proceed to fill it. If I tried to insist on doing it myself they would kindly but firmly take the bucket from me anyway. There were plenty of times when I would wait until nobody was around and run over to pull a bucket of water, only to be caught by Awa and scolded, literally: “You can’t tell me when you want water!? You’re not a person!” Heaven forbid there be some kids in the area who had “let” me try to pull my own water, or they’d get quite a scolding too, at the very least. When I ask why I can’t pull my own water, Awa always responds that I’ll ruin my nice toubab hands on the rope. Perhaps there’s something to this, as some of my female volunteer friends occasionally develop “water pulling” calluses on their hands, but then who said I was afraid of a little callus?
No, the real reason, I’ve figured out, is entirely different. In the Malian respect/importance hierarchy, I as a (white) male am pretty well near the top, especially because everyone thinks I’m much older than I really am – I’ll get to that in a bit. Add to that my status as an (honored) guest, even a long term one, and you can’t get much higher on the totem pole without being in government. Guests are generally treated very well in Mali, and they would never be expected to pull their own well water. As the thinking goes, what if one of the neighbors walked in and saw me – a male guest of the house! – pulling my own water? Oh that would be a shameful thing indeed! Everyone in town would think “who are these people, who make even a guest pull his own water?! How outrageous!”
I was talking about an experiment though, and here’s what I mean: Awa’s been gone to San for a couple weeks, and with the kids all gone too that just leaves my host dad and I, and occasionally Lasso. What, then, would my host dad do – let me do the work myself, or take the place of Awa (at least where water pulling is concerned – I have no reason to suspect that he’s any more adept at hand washing clothes than I am, and I know I’m a better cook)? Well it’s been thoroughly tested and: no. Apparently it’s only a shame for a guest to pull their own water and wash their own dishes (I’ve been conserving clothes so that hasn’t arisen yet – I’m hoping to ride out the storm) if there’s a woman or young person in the house (family or not – I forgot to mention that strange women and children who happen to be in the concession often insist on pulling my water) who should be doing it for them. If it’s just the men of the house, well I’m on my own. Guest status or no, the man of the house isn’t expected to stoop to the women’s work of pulling my water for me.
On being old, or at least looking it: Malians have a really hard time telling my age. I went out to visit Laura’s village just before July 4th and her host-father, who I believe is in his seventies, asked me how old I was – “sixty?” he guessed. He’d overshot by about 36 years, or 250%. Never mind what this would mean for Laura and my relationship, since he knows how old she is – this would be far from unheard of in Mali, although she’d probably have to be my third or fourth wife. I asked him what made him think I was so old, to which he replied “I cekoroba si” – literally, “your old man hair.” Now I know what you’re thinking Toby and Alex, and no, he couldn’t have meant my thinning hairline… well, balding spot as some would say. Anyway I’d been wearing a hat since I met him. No, he meant my beard – Malians don’t normally grow facial hair until middle age, if at all, and I have more than most of even the oldest men, which frequently confuses them. It’s not so bad, since I get a lot of cekoroba respect – that is, old man respect, which can be quite useful at times.
Well it’s certainly rainy season again! Having been through all the seasons once now, I think I’ve decided that rainy season is my least favorite season here. Cold dry season is of course my favorite, closely followed by hot dry season. Hot season was certainly hot, but it wasn’t nearly so bad as I’d been led to expect. I don’t mean that it wasn’t as hot, just that the heat really didn’t bother me like I thought it would. Sure, you sweat 24 hours a day and have to dash between shady spots during the day, but once you sit yourself down in a nice shady spot there’s plenty of time to relax, chat, read, drink tea, and everyone else does the same. Plus bragging about how hot it is and who’s site is hotter never seems to get old. Though it was too hot to sleep inside at night, I rather enjoyed sleeping outside for a few months and the lack of moisture meant that I never had to worry about a midnight rainstorm disturbing my slumber. Not only that, but with the sky crystal clear every night and no light pollution, the stars are simply dazzling and grace à my star chart (left over from the Observational Astronomy course I took senior year, and much more useful in Mali than it was in New York) I have a lot of fun identifying constellations and individual stars and planets. On a clear night during cold season it’s even possible to see both the North Star and Southern Cross at the same time, which is impossible just a bit farther north or south of here.
As I was saying though, rainy season is here, and that means mud. Not just rain mud, which is everywhere, but nyegen water mud. Since there’s no sewer system of course, the water people use for washing (themselves, dishes, clothes, babies, sheep, bikes, motos, etc.) runs out of their concessions through drainage holes in the walls made for the purpose and into the streets. Whereas in dry season this would quickly disappear, now it creates perpetual muck pools filled with rotting bits of food and other miscellaneous nastiness. Some of these pools stretch from one concession wall across the road to the other concession, so that you can only avoid the mud by carefully-chosen steps. Consequently I’ve had to stop riding my bike around town, since the tires inevitably pick up this mud and fling it onto my clothing.
The solution is soak pits – that is, a covered pit filled with rocks, with PVC pipe catching the water running off the wash areas and channeling it into the pit, where it can soak into the ground without making a muddy pool in the street (the muddy pools also provide handy breeding-grounds for Malaria-carrying mosquitoes, so soak pits are important for health as well as aesthetic reasons). There are a few soak pits around town, but these are mostly uncovered and filled with sludge that prevents water from being absorbed. It seems likely to me that at some point an NGO came by and told the townspeople to dig them, but didn’t explain why or how to maintain them, so once they stopped working the townspeople lost interest. Fixing that problem will have to be one of my primary goals for the coming year.
Another problem unique to rainy season is that all the trash, animal dung, child dung (they love to greet me on my way to work while popping a squat in the field in front of my concession), etc. that’s been lying around on the ground for the past eight months without rain to carry it away suddenly becomes mobile. Inevitably a lot of it ends up in the groundwater, or washed into wells directly, which means it’s water-borne disease season. Speaking of which, I’m now being treated for amebic dysentery. After testing positive for dormant ameba cysts I’d been on the lookout for it, and decided on Tuesday that not only do I have it now (active amebas causing dysentery), but I’ve had it countless times over the past few months. It comes and goes whenever my immune system takes a hit, and I didn’t identify it before because its symptoms have thankfully been mild. Since bad cases can cause an abscess in the liver which can then drain into the lungs and cause the victim to cough up foul black fluid, I’ve gotten off pretty easily. So far.
Saturday, July 5th
Well it’s just after American Independence day, which I’ve spent here in Manantali. Getting here from Bamako on the 3rd was a bit of an adventure, involving 14 hours of travel. Someone recommended Gana Transport for the Bamako – Kita leg since they are on time and professional, at least compared to other Malian bus companies. Well that doesn’t mean much. To be fair, it didn’t leave too late once the bus arrived in the station. It was slightly hilarious when it arrived, as nobody could figure out how to open the door. For a good 20 or 30 minutes. I’m not sure how it could have been so difficult, considering the driver was inside the vehicle. Eventually they succeeded in opening the door, at which point all the waiting Malians stormed on board, despite the company’s protestations that they would call people in the order of when tickets were bought. So we had nearly last choice for seats (being much less accustomed to muscling our way through crowds than your average Malian), but we got good seats anyway. Really any bus ride like that, where the bus has windows that open and the other passengers allow you to open them, is a good ride by default. Most Malian buses are designed for air conditioning, so the windows don’t open, but I’ve never been on a bus where the a/c actually worked. If there are windows, it’s often a fight to keep them open, since most Malians think that wind gives you Malaria. Well anyway before we’d left Bamako it became apparent that something was very wrong with the bus’ transmission, but we left all the same. Sure enough the bus broke down on the road, although through some incredible stroke of luck this occurred just outside of Kita, so we were able to walk the few remaining kilometers into town. The journey from Kita to Manantali, in a bache with wooden benches instead of seats for 4 or 5 hours on a bad dirt road, was less eventful.
Monday, July 7th
Arriving at Manantali in the middle of the night is an impressive experience. After traveling for hours through the total darkness of deep-brousse Mali, you come over the peak of a mountain to look out over the small but well-lit city, walled in by mountains on two sides and the giant dam that holds back the giant lake of the Bafing reservoir and provides power to Mali, Senegal, and Guinea, and is Manantali’s raison d’être. The PC has a house there, which is unremarkable except in its location right on the Bafing River (downstream from the dam/reservoir). I’d been really looking forward to seeing hippos in the wild, which hang out in said river, often right in front of the house. Unfortunately the water level was too high, so all the hippos were off hanging out farther downstream somewhere – of the 42 of us there, only two or three managed to catch a glimpse of one, early on the 6th, before a fisherman’s boat scared it off.. This did, however, make it easy to keep our promise to the medical staff no to have any “hippo accidents” over the holiday, hippos being the second most deadly animal to humans in Africa, second only to elephants.
The other thing the house is famous for is monkeys, and they did not disappoint. During the day they would simply hang out in the trees around the house, and seemed to pay about as much attention to us as we were paying to them. At night we slept outside in our mosquito-net tents, and the monkeys seemed to get a little braver, sitting in the trees just over our heads and calling out to each other in that distinctive monkey “han! han!” Each of the three nights I slept there I woke up in the middle of the night and enjoyed laying there listening to them for a while as I slowly drifted back to sleep.
The 4th itself was fun, we spent the day hanging out, swimming in the hippo-free river, and roasting an entire pig (quartered and relieved of its head and guts) in a pit we’d dug for the purpose. One of the volunteers even produced a bottle of Tennessee Whiskey Barbecue Sauce, that had left Tennessee with his son months ago, hung out in Italy for a few months, before finally flying through Casablanca and into Bamako when the son came to visit. We even managed to restrain ourselves enough that most everyone got a taste of it. I will never take a bottle of good, authentic barbecue sauce for granted again!
Wednesday, July 9th
Now a while ago I was explaining the things that change during rainy season, and I’d like to continue that now. Apart from the mud, the other thing I really don’t like about rainy season is the bugs. During cold and hot dry seasons bugs are virtually nonexistent, the exceptions being a certain amount of flies, which are omnipresent except at night when they are replaced by the occasional scorpion. As rainy season arrives though, the bugs more than make up for all the party time they’ve missed. Flies now come in hordes all the time and for no particular reason – in dry season they only come in hordes whenever I thought the word “mango!” which, unfortunately, is hard to avoid while eating one. Any small abrasion or cut that I fail to cover up provides a focal point for their swarming, which can be quite gross. It’s worse for my dog though. Somehow all Malian dogs get wounds on their ears during rainy season. Or perhaps they get them all the time, but they’re only significant during rainy season. How they get them I don’t know; fight with another dog? Fight with a Malian? My host dad says they just appear, without cause. A small wound is harassed incessantly by flies (it’s not like the dog can go into a screened-in house for refuge), which causes the dog to scratch it incessantly. Thus a scabbed-over wound becomes an open one, and a small wound becomes a bigger one, from the dog’s own scratching. Since the lack of flies at night allows the wound to scab over, the process repeats every day.
Apart from the flies, the spiders are also back, and setting up homes everywhere, especially in mine. And not just little web-spinners, but large tarantula-style ones too. Apparently they prefer to live in holes in the ground, but once the rain fills these up they’re left with few options but indoors. The same is true of snakes, they tell me; so far I haven’t seen any. My host father tells me we don’t have to worry about snakes at site since we have a lot of pigs (thanks to the non-Muslim Bobo population) unlike the rest of Mali, and pigs love to eat snakes. At first I though this was absurd, but I watched some of “The Lonesome Dove” a couple weeks back, and they also mentioned something about pigs eating snakes, so now I’m just skeptical.
I like to complain, but really rainy season’s not all bad. For one thing the temperatures are much more moderate, and can even be cool during and after a rainstorm. Rainstorms themselves are also fun – like they were when I was a kid but more so, since there’s no real shelter (that is, lace where I can go and forget that it’s raining) so I’m forced to enjoy the entire storm. My tin roof makes sure I know the second the rain starts and stops, and provides soothing white noise for the duration. My favorite rainy season activity is sitting just inside my door and watching the rain and reading, while sipping hot hibiscus tea.
Rainy season is also gardening season. I’m no expert – my sister can tell you how close I came to starving a cactus in my apartment in Boston, and that was with the help of two roommates. I’m having much better luck here, and though I’ve only yet tried moringa trees, I hope to eventually make a herb/vegetable garden, with tomatoes, basil, mint, baobab, moringa, and maybe a cucumber or two.
A few weeks back, after the first really huge rain, we had a couple of days of biblical plague of termites. This is a strange thing to list under “reasons rainy season is cool,” I know, but I enjoyed it. It was surreal – they go into “migrate!” mode and sprout wings, flying around frantically. During the day you can’t take two steps without having to dodge a few. Eventually they land somewhere and shed their wings, going into “run around aimlessly!” mode. Consequently the chickens go nuts running around eating them, as do the lizards. Since they can’t keep up with the sheer number of the bugs, the ants also have a field day, rallying the troops and dragging termite bodies (alive or dead) off into their mounds. I’ve never seen so many critters; birds, reptiles, and insects, all running around in their own unique but equally frantic way. True, my door frame has been chewed apart, but that happened before this rainy season arrived, I think. It’s less fun at night, when they swarm toward any source of light including headlamps, which makes going to the bathroom interesting: either you do it in the dark or you multitask, constantly swatting them away with one hand. I haven’t yet seen it, but my host dad tells me that they’ll soon be available in the market by the bucketful, and when fried are quite tasty. Believe it or not I’m looking forward to that – they’re high in protein, which is otherwise hard to come by. The collection method is simple, and follows the headlamp-in-the-nyegen principle: you leave a light on with a bucket of water underneath. They fly to the light, land, shed their wings, and fall into the bucket to drown.
While on the subject of bugs and lights, there’s one thing I forgot to mention under the “things I don’t like about rainy season,” and that’s the blister beetles. I’m not sure they’re rightly called “beetles,” since they appear to be in the hymenoptera family along with wasps and ants, and they’ve got large, wasp-like wings. They’re about ¾ to an inch in length, and also like to swarm around lights, such as headlamps. They secrete an acidic substance that causes a blister to form when it comes into contact with skin. If one of these bugs lands on you, you have to gently blow it off and hope it didn’t smear its poison on you anyway, which it probably did. The blister itself contains the acidic fluid, so if you pop it the blister will just spread. They present quite a problem at dinnertime – in order to see what you’re eating when the moon isn’t out, you must use a flashlight – but that attracts them both toward your face and your food, and you definitely don’t want to actually swallow one.
What I like most about rainy season though are the clouds. Either they’re far more impressive here than they are back home, or (more likely) I just notice them more since I’m outside all the time. Huge, billowing towers of cumulus are my favorite, with solitary black/grey rain clouds in the distance, blurry grey nothingness slanting down to the ground in the wind that always accompanies these clouds, announcing their presence to even the most oblivious observer just before the rain starts.
Tuesday, July 15
Well I surprised even myself just now. Really it was a long time in the making so “surprise” is a poor description, but I certainly crossed a line anyway. I was making scrambled guinea fowl eggs for lunch – with onion, le Vache qui Rit (the Laughing Cow) cheese, and cayenne pepper – and as usual was cracking my eggs into a tea glass separately in case one of them was bad. Also as usual I found a little fetus in each of the three eggs I cracked – just a little whitish-pinkish blob floating next to the yolk. Now months ago when guinea fowl eggs first came into season, I’d have thrown out the whole thing. However since I find at least a little fetus in around four in every five guinea fowl eggs I crack, if not more, I got over this stage quickly and resorted to just picking the fetus out and discarding it, cooking the rest. However this is difficult to do without losing half the egg, since they’re embedded in it and egg whites don’t separate easily – it’s like picking bits of shell out of the egg, but harder since they’re actually embedded in the whites. Often I’d attempt to scoop the fetus out and end up losing most of the egg-white for my troubles. Well today as usual I set about picking them out, but perhaps because I was using a fork (to keep my last clean spoon for later use) it was particularly annoying, so I gave up. I scrambled them in with all the rest. After all it’s protein, and I need all I can get on my diet of starch, starch, and more starch. I feel, intellectually, that I should be disgusted with myself, but frankly I’m not. Now one might ask why I don’t use chicken eggs – they’re bigger, easier to crack, and almost never come with fetuses, and the answer is of course that they’re more expensive – more than twice the price of guinea fowl eggs, at the moment. Now the price itself doesn’t bother me so much – I can afford it – but I feel really guilty buying chicken eggs since people always ask me, frowning as if I’ve been cheated, why I didn’t buy guinea fowl eggs for cheaper (GF eggs are 5/200 CFA (about 45 cents) while chicken eggs are 2/200 CFA). I could of course reply “haha! Because I’m a rich American and I scoff at your guinea fowl eggs!” but I spend a lot of time trying to discourage this image, though admittedly with little success.
Since the concession’s emptied out over the past couple weeks, I’ve been able to perform a bit of an experiment. One of the things that took some getting used to as a man in Mali was my role in housework – to be precise, I don’t have a role. My host mother washes my clothes, cooks my food, washes my dishes, and pulls all of the well water I need for bathing, filling my salidaga, washing my bike, etc. When my host mother isn’t around or is busy, one of the kids (be they 8 years old or 22) does it. At first I tried to resist. Well, okay I was happy to let them do my laundry – washing clothes by hand is hard work, and they’re much better at it than I am. I should add that I draw the line at underwear, which I wash myself with leftover water during my bucket baths; i.e. I do it on the sly. At first I tried insisting that I was perfectly capable of pulling my own water – in fact I can pull it much faster than Adjara, the 8 year old – but to no avail. Most of the time all I have to do is start walking the twenty steps from my front door to the well with a bucket in my hand and someone will run over, take it from me, and proceed to fill it. If I tried to insist on doing it myself they would kindly but firmly take the bucket from me anyway. There were plenty of times when I would wait until nobody was around and run over to pull a bucket of water, only to be caught by Awa and scolded, literally: “You can’t tell me when you want water!? You’re not a person!” Heaven forbid there be some kids in the area who had “let” me try to pull my own water, or they’d get quite a scolding too, at the very least. When I ask why I can’t pull my own water, Awa always responds that I’ll ruin my nice toubab hands on the rope. Perhaps there’s something to this, as some of my female volunteer friends occasionally develop “water pulling” calluses on their hands, but then who said I was afraid of a little callus?
No, the real reason, I’ve figured out, is entirely different. In the Malian respect/importance hierarchy, I as a (white) male am pretty well near the top, especially because everyone thinks I’m much older than I really am – I’ll get to that in a bit. Add to that my status as an (honored) guest, even a long term one, and you can’t get much higher on the totem pole without being in government. Guests are generally treated very well in Mali, and they would never be expected to pull their own well water. As the thinking goes, what if one of the neighbors walked in and saw me – a male guest of the house! – pulling my own water? Oh that would be a shameful thing indeed! Everyone in town would think “who are these people, who make even a guest pull his own water?! How outrageous!”
I was talking about an experiment though, and here’s what I mean: Awa’s been gone to San for a couple weeks, and with the kids all gone too that just leaves my host dad and I, and occasionally Lasso. What, then, would my host dad do – let me do the work myself, or take the place of Awa (at least where water pulling is concerned – I have no reason to suspect that he’s any more adept at hand washing clothes than I am, and I know I’m a better cook)? Well it’s been thoroughly tested and: no. Apparently it’s only a shame for a guest to pull their own water and wash their own dishes (I’ve been conserving clothes so that hasn’t arisen yet – I’m hoping to ride out the storm) if there’s a woman or young person in the house (family or not – I forgot to mention that strange women and children who happen to be in the concession often insist on pulling my water) who should be doing it for them. If it’s just the men of the house, well I’m on my own. Guest status or no, the man of the house isn’t expected to stoop to the women’s work of pulling my water for me.
On being old, or at least looking it: Malians have a really hard time telling my age. I went out to visit Laura’s village just before July 4th and her host-father, who I believe is in his seventies, asked me how old I was – “sixty?” he guessed. He’d overshot by about 36 years, or 250%. Never mind what this would mean for Laura and my relationship, since he knows how old she is – this would be far from unheard of in Mali, although she’d probably have to be my third or fourth wife. I asked him what made him think I was so old, to which he replied “I cekoroba si” – literally, “your old man hair.” Now I know what you’re thinking Toby and Alex, and no, he couldn’t have meant my thinning hairline… well, balding spot as some would say. Anyway I’d been wearing a hat since I met him. No, he meant my beard – Malians don’t normally grow facial hair until middle age, if at all, and I have more than most of even the oldest men, which frequently confuses them. It’s not so bad, since I get a lot of cekoroba respect – that is, old man respect, which can be quite useful at times.
1 comments:
i love the image you paint for me- i can just see you falling asleep under the stars naming the constellations and listening to the monkeys :)
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