This morning I worked on school stuff and made 4 loaves of bread. In the afternoon I had an amazingly productive 1 hour and 15 minutes in town. Here’s how that went:
I left home in our car at 2:00 with a long to do list, printed pages, ATM card, and money. (Even though I was planning to get money from the ATM I needed to bring enough money for everything I wanted to buy because getting money from an ATM is never a sure thing. On more than one occasion I have visited 3 machines in a row and still not gotten any money.)
I had just printed up 2 pages I needed to have photocopied. One was an assignment page for my 9th grade students, the other was a page that will be cut into 4 little advertisement flyers for the next trimester of adult English classes to begin in January. My first stop was the little photocopy shop. It costs 5 cents per page for photocopies.
Then I went into a back road of the downtown market area to find corn. We needed corn, or really I guess it is maize, for feeding our chickens and ducks. I was asked to buy a lot so that we don’t have to go buy more again any time soon. I found a place that sells corn, and I greeted the guy there. There were other guys sitting around nearby. They seemed to only speak Bambara and all had big smiles in reaction to my attempts to speak their language. I said I wanted corn and the guy asked if I wanted white corn or red corn (which is actually yellow.) I said I didn’t know, it would be to feed our chickens and “the ones which are like chickens but they like to swim in water.” I blanked out on the word for “duck” so that was my explanation, and they all thought it was pretty funny and then reminded me of the word for duck. I wound up calling JP to ask which color corn we wanted, and I bought a 100 kilogram sack of red (yellow) corn. It cost $20. I sat a chatted (or tried my best) with the seller and his buddies for a few minutes. Before I left I was given a decent size bag full of dried hibiscus flower as a gift; this is used to make a special juice. I’m not sure if the gift was in recognition of the entertainment I provided or in hopes that I will become a repeat customer.
Next I went to the street corner where salad fixings are sold. It is on the edge of the market area. To go into the market I’d have to find a place to park and then walk a bit into the market and wander around there. The salad corner is super convenient if you only need limited produce. There are always baskets full of lettuce, and usually you can find cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, eggs, and a few other small things. I went to a lady that had veggies and eggs and bought some of almost everything she had to offer, even green beans! (those are coming into season now) I was happy for the 1 stop shopping. On the way back to the car that I had left around the corner, I stopped to greet one salad lady who knows my name. I saw that she had plantain bananas for sale and since JP loves to fry those up to eat, I thought I’d buy some. “How much are the… um, strange/wonder bananas?” I asked. I couldn’t remember if I had ever learned the word for plantains in Bambara. She smirked and said, “ah, the loko?” Yes, that was what I meant! The name we call the pieces of fried plantains is “aloco” and that’s what people say when speaking French. There are plenty of borrowed words in Bambara that come from French, so it’s not bad to try the French word when I don’t know the Bambara word for something. I bought some “loko” and went on to the good gas station.
There are several places that sell gas, but only one that we trust. A man in a red uniform pumps the gas for you, you just stay in the car (or stand next to your motorcycle) and tell him how much gas you want to buy. I filled up the tank to be ready for the trip out of town that I will take for Thanksgiving. Gas is pricey here and the price doesn’t fluctuate. It stays at about $5 per gallon, I can’t say exactly because though the price here doesn’t change, the exchange rate does.
JP usually gets money out of the ATM for us. I feel quite safe in our town, but there is something about coming out of an ATM (they’re always inside a little room)where obviously I went into to get money, that makes me feel a bit nervous like someone might be lurking and ready to try to steal the money. Today was nice in that I got money out of the first ATM I visited.
I turned back toward home and stopped at the drive-thru banana tables. These are tables with piles of bananas for sale conveniently located right on the edge of the road. I stayed in the car and the lady brought the bananas to me, what service!
After the bananas (regular bananas, not the strange/wonder ones!) I drove the 4 minutes that it takes to get from the downtown area to our house. I arrived home at 3:15 and was quite impressed with how smoothly my 1 hour and 15 minutes had gone (not counting the language hiccups) and how much I had accomplished already for one day.
I realized I hadn’t eaten lunch yet, so I used some of the veggies I’d bought to make a salad and I sliced one of the fresh loaves of bread I had made that morning.
We went to our base for the meeting and then came back home to welcome a visiting friend. I cooked a quick meal to share together and we visited for a while.
Now it’s late and I should be sleep. I will be teaching 9th grade English from 8-10 tomorrow morning.
