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Wednesday, June 24, 2015

an African story starring Turtle

I love a good folk tale.  Today during my Bambara lesson my language tutor told me this one, and I understood enough of the story to make sense of it. (yay! I am making progress!) So here is my retelling of a traditional African story:

Many of the forest animals were friends.  Turtle learned that two of his good bird friends would be having their wedding up in the sky.  Turtle really wanted to go to the wedding, but since he didn’t have wings it seemed impossible to get up there.  One of his bird friends got the other birds together and they all agreed to each give one of their feathers to Turtle.  Turtle gathered all of the feathers together, and then he was able to fly up to the bird wedding in the sky. 
The festivities took place over several days.  When the birds and Turtle arrived, they were asked their names by the host.  Turtle said that his name was “You All.”  The host cooked some good food and gave it to the guests saying “Here is some food for you all to eat.”  Turtle said “Did you hear that? The food is for me!”  And he ate all of the food without sharing.  This happened again and again in the same way for the next few meals.  The birds were very angry with Turtle, and they each decided to take back the feather that they had given.  Turtle was left with no feathers, so he could not fly back home. 
When the wedding was finished and the birds were ready to go back to the forest, Turtle pleaded with them, “Will you please give a message to my wife?  Tell her to take everything soft out of the house, like our mattress, couch, and pillows, and pile it all together in our yard.”  Turtle was planning to jump down from the sky and he wanted a soft place to land.  But the birds were still angry, so the message they said to Turtle’s wife was, “Turtle wants you to put all of the sharp and hard things together in a pile in the yard.” 
So Mrs. Turtle took the cooking pots, knives, and metal tools and piled them up in the yard.  Turtle jumped down from the sky and his shell shattered into pieces when he hit the pile.  Mrs. Turtle picked up the pieces of Turtle’s shell and brought them to the cobbler who sewed the pieces back together.  And this is why a turtle’s shell looks the way it does.

Sunday, June 21, 2015

make friends, get bonus fruit

Hot season in Mali is intense.  We have temperatures over 100 degrees every day for a couple months.  Soaring temperatures with no air conditioning and frequent power cuts is brutal.  Thankfully there is an immediate reward for this suffering: Mangoes!  I don’t know why mango season coincideswith hot season, but I’m glad that it does!
Mangoes can be found for sale everywhere for 10 to 25 cents each.  Or you can get them for free if you have a mango tree in your yard or if you have a friend who does.  There are many different kinds of mangoes and I have learned the names of a few of my favorite varieties so that I can be sure to buy the really good ones.  A really good mango is huge and perfectly ripe so as to be juicy but not squishy and it is sweet like candy but somehow healthy because it is fruit.
If you take a trip on the road, there are many places to stop along the way where there will be long lines of ladies selling piles and piles of mangoes.  I am looking forward to one day getting a chest freezer so that we can cut and freeze mangoes and keep having them throughout the year.  For now, I just eat as many as I can handle during mango season.
There is a paved road near the house I am staying at and in the evening there are ladies with tables on the sides of the road.  Some of the ladies have vegetable tables with lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions.  And some of the ladies have fruit tables with mangoes, bananas, and possibly some oranges and imported apples. 
I have made friends with one of the fruit sellers.  In Mali you have to greet before you do anything else.  It would be ok just to do a basic quick greeting and then get to business.  But since I wasn’t in a hurry and there were no other customers waiting, I started chatting with the fruit lady.  She doesn’t speak any French, so it was good practice for my Bambara.  I learned that her name is Aissata and she is of the Dogon ethnic group.  I can’t really remember what all we chatted about, but she was a nice lady and we talked for a few minutes before I asked about the prices of fruit.  I chose a pile of 4 premium mangoes  for $1 and I picked 4 not quite ripe ones at 10 cents each from the back of the table.   Aissata put the mangoes I chose into a plastic bag.  Then she looked at me to make sure I was paying attention and she grabbed one more of the 10 cent mangoes to add to my bag as a present.  Then she went a step further (and ensured my repeat business) and put a free banana into my bag as well.  I have gone a few times since then to buy fruit from her.

Here is what $1.40 worth of mangoes looks like.  They are in these basins so I can soak them in bleach water.  The greenish ones will ripen in a day or two on the counter.  The ripe ones go in the fridge.


Friday, June 5, 2015

now we're cooking with gas!


Of course the gas ran out the day after my husband left on his trip. 
Stoves run on a bottle of gas here, similar to a gas barbeque grill.  Having an electric stove wouldn’t really work out too well because the power cuts pretty often and because the price for electricity is high.  A bottle of gas costs $20 or so to refill.  Mine usually lasts for about 6 weeks.
While I’m in Bamako to teach English I’ve been staying at the house of some friends who are away.  They left a note saying that when the gas runs out there’s a spare bottle in the storage room out back.
 
Today at lunch time I wanted to bake some fish so I lit the oven and popped the pan of fish in.  After 15 minutes I went to open the oven door to check on the fish and I could feel that the stove was only slightly warm and I saw that the fish was still raw.  The gas had run out shortly after I had lit the oven.  Ugh.
So I unscrewed the empty gas bottle from the hose connected to the stove.  Then I thought hard about where the key for the outside storage room might be.  I finally found a bowl of keys by the house’s main door and had to try a half dozen keys before one would go into and turn in the lock on the storage room door.
I found the full bottle in the storage room.  It was thickly coated with dust and webby stuff.  I got the bottle out the door and then brought some water over to rinse it off.  The distance between there and the stove in the kitchen might be 60 feet, but I had to carry the bottle in in 3 segments.  Those things are ridiculously heavy.  I got the bottle to the kitchen and attached the hose to it.  By now I was quite sweaty as the temperature is still 100 or more during the day and it has become very humid as it is raining about once a week.  Soon we will be in rainy season and it will rain every day and the temps will cool off a little bit. 
Now I just needed to turn the knob on top of the gas bottle to open the gas flow and relight the oven to cook the fish.  The knob on top of the bottle wouldn’t budge.  I tried using a towel to get a better grip on it.  I went into the office and dug in some drawers and found some tools.  There was a hammer but no kind of pliers.  I tried banging on the ridges of the knob in the direction to get it to open.  That didn’t work, but it got me much sweatier for the effort.  I don’t know exactly how long everything took me up to this point, but it was a long time.  I finally gave up because I needed to get ready to go teach at school.  I put the pan of fish in the fridge and ate some toast.
After school I came home and the night guard was there.  Most international workers employ guards to, well, guard their house.  The guard will usually water plants and sweep the yard too.  We have never employed a guard, but it is normal for most expats to have them.  Anyway, the guard was there and so I asked him if he could help me with the gas bottle in the kitchen.  Bernard came in and put his big man hands to work but he couldn’t get the knob to budge either.  I felt much less wimpy in that moment.  He left to ask the shopkeeper a couple doors down for a tool to use.  He came back with a not-completely-appropriate-for-the-job pliers type tool.  That didn’t work.  He went back to talk to the shopkeeper.  He came back and asked me if there was a hammer.  I gave it to him.  Several minutes later using the inappropriate pliers and the hammer together, Bernard got the knob to twist.  And I got to eat fish at 9pm.