trouble at home, becoming a cook

Malian kids love Time Magazine!

Cow grazing in the traffic circle - common problem in Mali

The sheep in my concession gave birth again, this is the new lamb at less than 2 days old

Mother and Daughter #2. Daughter significantly cuter than mother...




First off, a very big THANK YOU to everyone who's donated toward my swimming project. We've come a long way towards the goal of completing funding, and the response I've gotten from those of you back home has been nothing short of amazing. In fact it's been so amazing that Peace Corps Washington has agreed to leave the project up on the website for another month, until mid-October - so if any of you out there were thinking about donating but didn't make it in by Sept 12th, there's still time! Again the link is: https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.donors.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=688-231
Thanks again, and I hope to be able to say thank you in person when I get back to the states around this time next year.

Thursday, August 28

Well it appears that Awa (host-mom) isn’t coming back. She left sometime in the last week of June, while I was away visiting L’s site and going to July 4^th in Manantali, and hasn’t returned. The reason I’ve been given for her original departure was that she went to the big hospital in San to get checked out for some kind of stomach pain. This seems a bit strange to me, since there’s a doctor in our Circle capitol, but not unreasonable since the hospital in San is far bigger. I hadn’t heard anything about the pains before she left, but then Malians can be private about such things so that’s not entirely surprising. Awa being ethnically Bobo and San being the center of Bobo Mali, she was to stay with some friends or relatives in San while being treated.

As the end of July approached and she hadn’t returned, I started questioning Danger (host-dad) about it but wasn’t too worried – at least twice since I’ve been here she’s gone to visit relatives for “a week” and stayed for three or four. Anyway Danger agreed that she’d been gone a while and should be back soon, but didn’t seem overly worried. I kept asking though, and soon he was able to provide dates – “she’ll be back on next market day!” but after missing a few of these dates with no explanation, I started pressing Danger. He allowed as how he’d heard that she’d returned from San, passed through town without stopping, and continued on to the predominantly Bobo village that she comes from, about 80km away from my site, without explanation.

Danger gave me the impression that what was now delaying her was a mere inability to find transport, so he would send one of his (half?) brothers, Amadou or Lasso, to out with a moto and bring her back. Dates were set for the trip, missed for various reasons, and after another week or two Amadou finally went. I had begun to suspect that Danger wasn’t telling me something, and asked him if he and Awa were fighting. He seemed taken aback, denied knowing about any fight, and asked me to ask her when she got back if she was mad at him for something and tell him if she was. By this time I was quite impatient for Awa’s return – apart from my dwindling supply of clean clothes, I missed Awa herself. Since she’s the woman in the family she’s home a lot more than Danger is, so I’ve gotten to hang out and get to know her far better than anyone else in village, and she feels far more like family to me than Danger does.

I was more than a bit ticked when Amadou returned empty-handed. All he would say was that she wouldn’t come, and that he’d spoken with her father who told him that Awa claims she and Danger are in a fight, and she’s not going anywhere until Danger comes out himself to deal resolve the situation. My anger turned to puzzlement when I asked Danger about it, who reported that Awa was “lying” – that they’re not in a fight, and that she’s bad for lying to her father and saying that they were in a fight. Further, since they “aren’t in a fight,” Danger refused to go out himself. He also cited some taboo about how it would be socially unacceptable for him to go and try to resolve the situation with his father-in-law. Now this second thing I can kind of see – though I wasn’t previously aware of any such taboo, Malians traditionally resolve all conflicts through a third-party intermediary (another function of a Griot besides weddings). But what he meant by “she’s lying, we’re not in a fight” I can’t possibly even begin to fathom. Even if Danger wasn’t aware of being in a fight, clearly there is one; if there wasn’t reason for them to be fighting beforehand, then this “lie” (and why she would create such a lie I also can’t fathom) would seem reason enough for them to be in a fight now.

While my mind was doing summersaults trying to work out what the heck was going on, Danger said he’d send another friend, much older and wiser than Amadou, to work it out. The next day I had to go to Koutiala to meet the new volunteers visiting their sites, and spent most of the following week running around village here with the volunteer who was to join me in site and then away in Bamako trying to figure out logistics for my swim project. When I finally got back last week, Awa was still missing. When I asked Danger if she’d be coming back any time soon, this time his response was “she’s not coming back, we’re getting divorced.” I asked him again what had happened, what wasn’t he telling me, but again he just said that nothing had happened, he wasn’t hiding anything. They’re just getting divorced, for no apparent reason. I’ve asked everyone else I can think of that might tell me something more, but the response is always either “I don’t know anything about it” or “nothing happened, Awa is a bad person.” Sometimes they generalize to say that all Bobo women are bad, though a little racial tension is to be expected – after all, of all the many ethnicities found in Mali, Bobo is the only one that is overwhelmingly and conspicuously composed of Millet-beer-drinking, pork-eating Christians.

Still the whole situation sucks, and I don’t understand a bit of it. Did Danger do something to Awa? Were these “stomach pains” really something more sinister? A certain amount of domestic violence is quite common and even accepted in Mali, but on the other hand I’ve never seen Danger hit anyone, not even his kids (Malian child-discipline is a bit more corporeal than it is in the states). The only complaint that I can ever remember Awa leveling at Danger was that he should get a second wife since she wanted help with the housework (Danger, being the exception to the rule, didn’t want another wife despite the fact that he is certainly well-off enough to acquire one).

If Danger really didn’t do anything, then is Awa just crazy? I find both of these explanations very hard to believe, but I can’t see what else it could be since and since Awa’s not here I can’t get her side of the story. As I was writing that last sentence I asked the woman (Danger’s half-cousin?) that has been here all day washing Danger’s clothes (I paid a village laundry-lady to wash mine yesterday) what happened. She used to hang out in the concession washing clothes with Awa, so I hoped she might give me a new perspective on the issue; but all she said was “nothing happened, Awa’s just a bad person.” I can’t believe that, but I don’t know what to believe.

Friday, August 29

Apart from Awa herself, I miss her cooking. She’s an excellent cook by Malian standards, and always made sure I had at least twice as much food as I could possibly eat at every meal. That’s Malian hospitality – if you’re not fatter when you leave than you were when you arrived, they weren’t a good host. A common compliment here is “look how fat you’ve become,” much to the consternation of the female volunteers. Still if I can say that anything good has come of the whole Awa-Danger situation, it’s that I’ve had to learn to cook. Danger would feed me, but for the short time I relied on him that meant that he would bring me a over-cooked spaghetti-noodles swimming in oil with Maggi and maybe a bit of onion (that’s how “macaroni” is always served in Mali), and that only whenever Danger happened to get home – maybe 3:30 for lunch, well past 8:00 for dinner.

Clearly that couldn’t last. Now I’m not saying I’ve become a gourmet chef – at the moment I only make a couple of dishes – but the change is a big one. Take my favorite new dish for example: spaghetti marinara. Doesn’t sound exciting does it? But for someone who once committed the unforgivably tactless act of telling his mother he preferred store-bought spaghetti sauce to her home-made variety, this is quite an about-face. It’s possible that it only tastes so good after eating Malian food for a year, but when I get home you can keep your Prego and your Newman’s Own ‘cause I make it much better.

I also have been putting a lot of eggplant in the sauce, which I can’t remember ever even trying before a month ago. I disliked eggplant on principle; eggplant? does that sound appetizing to anyone? Eggplant Parmesan? Why the heck not have veal or chicken parm instead, what’s this vegetable doing masquerading as a meat? Alas, Laura’s trying to turn me into an omnivore, and succeeding.

I haven’t yet really gotten baking down, but there’s reasons for that. One is that the banana bread recipe I’ve been using (from the Peace Corps Mali cookbook) doesn’t work for anyone. Got a good recipe anyone? The second reason is that I of course don’t have an oven. I use a “brousse oven,” which means I take a bigger pot and sit it on the burner, put some rocks in the bottom of it and a little water, then sit a smaller pot containing the batter inside it, and cover them both. There’s no way to regulate the temperature – stick your hand in, does that feel like 350 degrees? They say it doesn’t get very hot, but it got hot enough to melt the plastic handle on the lid of the inner pot the first time I tried it – mmm, banana bread with plastic syrup! Laura’s much better at baking – the other day she made a pumpkin bread in her own (non-melty) brousse oven, and it was absolutely delectable.

Cooking a lot and eating off my own dishes means that the dirty dishes pile up fast, so I’ve been spending a fair amount of time washing dishes. Of course every time I do the other men in the concession call me Djeneba (common girl’s name), remind me that washing dishes is women’s work, and ask me if I have, in fact, become a woman. It can be quite annoying, but then I’ll take delicious victuals with a side of gender-role confusion over soggy noodles in oil any day.