Holidays

My host father and his three wives, plus some of the grandkids.
Two of the grandsons stretch out the sheepskins to dry.
My kitten likes the window!

Thursday was Seliba, the biggest Muslim holiday – 70 days after the end of Ramadan. Basically, every family kills a sheep, then everyone gorges themselves on meat and everything else. My host father, Zange, told me to come to his house at 11. I was relieved to have such explicit instructions, because holidays can make me feel rather out of place here. They all go to the mosque to pray at 9, then slaughter the animals, so I hung around the house and waited. I even slept in (ha, till 6:50), but was luckily awake when the guy came with the chickens I’d ordered to give as gifts.

There was a slight difficulty with the chickens just before I left the house, as I was planning to give one to my host family, but the four of them were all in one box. I wasn’t sure if their legs were tied, so I opened to box just a little. They weren’t tied but they didn’t seem to be struggling to escape, so I had the box open just a little as I contemplated how to grab one by the legs. Just then, the most feisty of the chickens made a break for it and escaped. I chased it around my yard for a while, but if I couldn’t even grab one from in a box there was no way I was going to capture a loose chicken.

I was going to leave it in the yard and count on the high walls to keep it in while I got someone from my host family to help me. But I made one last lunge for it, which made it flap it’s way over the wall. I found some kids to help me, and they caught it and got it back in the box. I concluded that all I could do was take the whole box to my host family and have them help me sort the chickens out when it was time to take the rest of them to their recipients.

Anyway, when I eventually arrived at my host family’s, we started by eating sorghum tho (sorghum is a grain, tho is a pasty starchy food staple made of corn, millet or sorghum) with okra sauce (why?! We eat that everyday!) while they were frying some of the organs in oil (my host family slaughtered five sheep). Then we ate liver and some other parts that I don’t want to know more details about. Liver is considered the biggest delicacy, so they gave me a lot, which is unfortunate because I’m not a huge fan, but I ate it.

From that point on, people were continually coming over bringing huge bowls of rice and sauce, and platters of meat. My host father is the head of a huge household – probably 100 people – and the former mayor of the commune, so lots of people sent him stuff. And everything was cooked in huge amounts of oil.

This led me to reflect on cultural differences in attitudes toward eating. In the U.S., we often eat when we’re not hungry, but we still think that we should only eat to satisfy hunger. Here, when food is available, you eat as much as you can, when you can, while you can. And this makes sense here, because in rural Mali, food is fuel in the most literal sense. People in my village burn an enormous number of calories each day because they do so much physical labor.

Meat is a special case. It’s an extreme delicacy here. On a normal day in my village, I’m surprised if there’s even a morsel of meat in a sauce. Fish, especially dried fish, is pretty common in my village, but usually each person only gets a small piece of that. On the rare occasion that meat is in a dish, again, each person gets just a taste. So this holiday is really special – it’s the one time in a year that people get to eat large quantities of meat, and you eat all you can.

On the second day of the holiday, my host father told me to come over at 8 and we would go together to greet the chief of the village, imam, and mayor, and bring them the chickens I’d bought. Getting the chickens for them turned out to be a stroke of genius. They were all really surprised and clearly immensely pleased, especially the imam (and it’s thanks to my language tutor that I thought to include him). We then proceeded to continue greeting at different households for several hours. Many people gave me meat to take home (I gave it to my host family). In some households I saw a pile of the heads of the slaughtered sheep.

The other thing that goes on both days of the holiday is that children get dressed up and go house to house, and people give them coins, candy and balloons. The children’s attitude toward the money really highlights the communal culture here. Some girls came to my house (I gave out candy, not money), and stayed to chat. I asked them if they’d gotten a lot of money, and they showed me a pile of coins. I asked them what they were going to buy, and they said, “we’re going tot share it.” In the evening at my host family’s house, some of the grandkids came back and tried to give their money to their parents or grandparents (who told them to keep it).

To go back to before the holiday, last week there was a nationwide integrated vaccination campaign. Targeting children under 5, we were vaccinating them against polio and measles (even if they’d already had those vaccines), plus giving them vitamin A, deworming medication, and an insecticide-treated mosquito net. All of this was completely free.

A mosquito net costs about 2,000 CFA normally. That’s about $4. But that is a huge amount of money in village. All the CSCOMs were supposed to have enough supplies for all the children under 5. If a woman had two children under 5, she got two nets, but two was the maximum, even if she had three children under 5.

Most women don’t know their kids’ ages, but we had to be really strict about the age limit if we were to have enough of everything, especially nets. It turns out there is a way to tell if a kid is 5. You put one of their arms over their head and see if they can touch their opposite ear. If they can, they’re 5.

We had three teams to execute the campaign – two teams to go out to other villages served by our CSCOM, and one team to stay at the CSCOM to do our own village and the village that’s one kilometer away. I was on the team with the doctor, staying in our village. Since we were going to be there for four days, I expected things to be spaced out. Ah, how naïve I was.

As I explained, mosquito nets are valuable items, and we were giving them out for free. Also, the women know how things work here –- supplies run out. And they wanted those nets. The first day, hundreds of women showed up by 9 a.m. Americans are taught from a very early age to stand in lines. Whenever there’s a lot of people, we usually line up automatically. Malians don’t do lines.

The result? The first day was pretty ugly. We worked till after 5 (we had to stop to report our numbers to the regional hospital), but we didn’t get to everyone who had come that day. There was pushing, shoving and yelling. At one point there was practically a riot.

The second day was much better because the crowd control was much stricter. We finished with all the people who had been waiting before 2, and everyone got mosquito nets. After that, people trickled in slowly, and we did eventually run out, but no one was angry because they knew they had come late. And total, I’d say it was less than 15 people who didn’t receive nets.

I’ve been intending for a while to write about the experience of learning Bambara. What makes Bambara difficult, and is very different from learning French, is that you just can’t translate things literally. It has a very small vocabulary, so more things are conveyed through structure, which is difficult to learn because you can’t just memorize words. I’m at the point with verbs where, if I want to know how to say something, it often turns out I already know the word, but I didn’t know that it generalized to have that meaning too. (Example: “nafa” means important, advantage, and benefit; “don” means know, discover, and realize).

Some nouns have multiple very different meanings, for example, stomach and bird are the same word, as are mother, goat, and river. A few words have ambiguities that mean you have to tread very carefully. “Wulu,” the word for dog, is also the word for penis, as is the word “foro,” which also means field. In “proper” Bambara, possessives are expressed differently for body parts, so if you’re careful you can avoid this, but in my region, you can do possessives however you want, so there’s not necessarily a distinction.

Not being an agriculture volunteer, I had pretty much avoided getting into this, until a couple of weeks ago, when the vaccinator’s wife asked me if I was going to go help him in the field. This was a joking conversation to begin with, because, being a fonctionnaire, he doesn’t work his own fields anyway. I replied that I didn’t know where his field was, and then realized I was in dangerous territory. Luckily I said it right and she didn’t notice, because if not I never would have heard the end of that. They think everything I say is hilarious and repeat it over and over no matter what, and this could have been juicy.

An agriculture volunteer, Jesise, was telling me that there’s all sorts of hilarious possibilities, because the word for “far” is the same as “long,” so if you ask, “is your field far?”…well, you get the idea.

Oh, Bambara. (As we always fondly exclaimed in language class during training.)