I realized that I haven’t really talked very much about the ins and outs of my daily life, so I’m going to try to address that a little. First to describe my family’s compound. You enter through a gate, and there is a well to the left. My family uses well water for washing, but a boy with a donkey cart brings around robinet (tap) water every day or two that they use for drinking and cooking. Each of my host mothers has her own “domain” – a living room and bedroom. I haven’t actually been in Awa’s bedroom, so I don’t know about her, but Kadiatou also has a western-style bathroom. However, while the whole thing is set up like a bathroom in the U.S., with a toilet, sink and showerhead, there is no running water. Off the courtyard are also entrances to two bedrooms, one for me and one for my teenage host brothers.
There is also the “kitchen,” which is really a room where pots and pans and other utensils are stored. The cooking all takes place in the courtyard itself over either wood or charcoal fires. There is another storeroom on the other side of the courtyard where my Kadiatou keeps her supplies for the stuff she sells in the market.
In the courtyard there is also a double nyegen. A nyegen, again, is basically a hole in the ground. Luckily my family’s has a cement floor, which is much pleasanter than the ones with just a dirt floor. I use the nyegen about half the time, but I almost always take my bucket baths in Kadiatou’s bathroom, because they prefer that I do.
Cooking is really different here. Like I said, my family only uses charcoal or wood fires. There are no counters or tables. They prepare everything in the courtyard, usually sitting on a chair and cutting things up in their hands. We have a small mortar and pestle that they use to grind certain ingredients. In our back alley there is a large mortar and pestle used to pound millet or corn.
Which brings me to the food. My homestay family feeds me very well. There is not nearly as much variety in the food here. There are several staple starches that are eaten with a variety of sauces. There is, of course, rice. That can pretty much go with any sauce (tigadegenan, or peanut sauce, tomato based sauce, green leafy sauce, or prepared like fried rice, which is my favorite).
Then there is to. To is made from millet (it can also be made from corn), it’s basically ground and cooked into a paste, and eaten with okra sauce and a red sauce. My family has only given me to once. If you know what okra is like, you can imagine that okra cooked into a sauce ends up having the consistency of snot. Lots of Americans don’t like to, but I felt that maybe with a different sauce I would have found it tolerable.
Couscous, or bashi, is my nemesis. It is not like couscous in the U.S., which I think is Arab couscous. It is a much finer texture, and I always feel like I’m eating sand. My family really likes couscous though so we have it a lot. It is usually accompanied by a green leafy sauce but we had it with something else the other day. I just try to take a lot of sauce and a little couscous, and I can deal with it.
There is another starch that we only had one time, called nyenyesiri or something like that. It is made from ground corn, and it is kind of the texture of mashed rice. We had that with peanut sauce and I thought it was pretty good, but we haven’t had it again.
We eat from a communal bowl. The bowl sits on the floor and we all sit on low chairs around it, and eat with our hands. Before eating, everyone washes their right hand in a bowl of water. You never, ever, ever use your left hand to eat (there is a good reason). Women and men don’t eat from the same bowl. In my family, when there are no other men around, the teenage boys will occasionally eat with us, but not usually. Kadiatou (the first wife) is the one that spoons the sauce on to the rice, and gets puts more food out if she notices that everyone still seems hungry. Kadiatou and Awa alternate cooking days, but this is always Kadiatou’s role.
At dinner, I don’t eat from the communal bowl because they make me separate food for dinner. The Peace Corps gave the families some orientation before we went to live there, and told them that Americans like more variety in their food. My family almost always eats the same thing they had for lunch for dinner, so they make me something separate, which is usually either meat and potatoes or yams in sauce, or pasta and meat. I really like this because I get tired of rice and I almost always like the food they give me for dinner.
There are also two sweetened porridges that they make, siri and moni. Siri is made with rice, and in my family we usually eat it as dessert in the evening, but some people eat it for breakfast. I LOVE siri. Before leaving homestay this last time I was able to ask Kadiatou, in Bambara, if when I returned she could teach me to make it. Moni is made from millet and I can’t stand it. I know that I can like millet porridges prepared a certain way, but moni does not do it for me. My family usually eats this for breakfast.
For breakfast they give me bread and tea.
This was a lot about food, but it's actually proportional to how important a topic food is in the lives of PCTs. We talk about it constantly: what we eat at each meal, how we liked it, what we crave, and what we miss.
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