A Day in the Life

A rundown of my typical day: I get up at 7 and give my bucket to my mom or my aunt for hot water for my bucket bath.  In the Muslim tradition, you can’t greet anyone before washing your face, so it’s an awkward few minutes as I silently stand there wrapped in my pagne waiting for someone to get me bath water with all the other family members long awake and going about their business.  At the same time, I like that I don’t have to be nice to anyone first thing in the morning!  I take my bucket bath in the ɲεgεn, which is an interesting experience.  At first it was really awkward to be crouched naked in a rather large area that's walled but not roofed, trying to bathe myself using a bucket and a cup.  But now I find there’s something kind of liberating about it.  My biggest complaints are the mid-60s temperature for my morning bath, which is quite freezing with no running hot water! And also that the floor is slanted, so it really becomes a challenge to crouch in my wet flip flops and not fall over.

After my bath I can greet the family.  Breakfast is usually porridge which is actually pretty good, but only when my dad or my brother comes over and puts in a baggie of sugar.  I guess it’s the Malian version of Wheaties – pretty healthy but not so good, but tasty with sugar!  Sometimes I also have fruit or yams or bread and hard boiled eggs.  After breakfast I go to school.  The 8 of us are divided into 2 language classes of 4 people each from 8-12 with one 25-ish minute break.  At noon we go home for lunch with our families, which usually makes me feel a lot better after a stressful class.  I eat lunch, drink tea with my dad, and go to my room to lay down or just relax.  Class starts again at 2:30 and goes till 5, and after that I either hang out for a while with my friends or go home to spend time with my family.  I’m always home by dark, which is around 7pm, and I take another bucket bath, mostly because my mom and aunt seem to want me to and I don’t know how to tell them it’s no big deal if I don’t.  

Dinner is around 7:30pm.  After dinner usually I go sit under the tree in front of our concession because Moussa runs a small butiki (small store: tea, sugar, cigarettes, gum, candy) out there at night.  Tons of kids and young adults crowd around as I struggle to talk to them, or as Moussa explains my photo album for the millionth time.  I don’t even bother commentating on it anymore, I just pass it off to him!  He’ll ask me for confirmation if he needs it, but he and Salif pretty much have the whole thing down by now.  One of the photos shows me wearing jeans, and the kids pointed it out and everyone crowed, "Oooh, Damadje's wearing pants!"  So the next day I wore pants so they could get used to it.  Women rarely wear pants in Mali, although it's becoming relatively more common now, especially in the cities.  It's ok for us to wear pants, but I try to limit how much I do, and usually I'll only wear them one day a week.  Several of the photos show my lip ring (which I don't wear here for cultural reasons, although my nose ring is fine) and they were lightning-quick to point it out.  So I suck in on my lower lip to show them the hole and once I stuck my earring through the hole so they could really see it.  They think it's hilarious.  

I try to say goodnight to everyone and go to my room somewhere between 9 and 10 pm.  It’s nice to have some alone time at night before bedtime, and I get really tired everyday, even though I often take a nap in the middle of the day.  At night I light my kerosene lamp and turn on my flashlight and do homework, write in my journal, or read a little bit.  I’ve started something new where I soak my feet every night in a bucket of water.  Since I wear sandals and there are no paved roads in Mountougula my feet are never ever clean.  It’s really nice to wash all the dust off at night, rub lotion on my feet, put on my aloe socks, and crawl into bed all nice and clean!  One night I’d had a rough day so I came home, cleaned my feet, and gave myself a pedicure with multicolor, bright, happy colors.  I guess happy feet mean a happy Michelle these days!

A quick note on food: it’s…different. Most meals are rice with a sauce or toh (I’ll explain in a moment).  The first 2 days we had fish in our sauce, which would be bad enough in the US (I am NOT a fish person) but was even worse Malian style, all slimy and fishy. I hardly ate any of it, so they would put the food in my room after dinner in case I was embarrassed to eat in front of them (it’s a cultural thing) and then my room would smell like fish.  So after 2 days I had my LCFs (Language and Cultural Facilitators, basically my Bambara teachers who live in my village and also guide me through adjusting culturally) come tell my family I don’t like fish, and they never gave it to me again.  Typically everyone eats with their hands around a big communal bowl.  As a toubab (white person) guest, I eat with only one other person, my brother Moussa, and sometimes I even get a spoon!  Challenge: imagine sitting in a chair (only my dad and I get chairs, everyone else squats) leaning over a bowl that’s sitting on the ground.  Now imagine rice in that bowl, covered in a sauce that includes large pieces of vegetables.  Now, eat that meal using only your hands.  Scoop up that saucy rice in your bare hands and navigate it all the way up to your elevated mouth and eat the whole handful without making a mess…it’s not easy!!!  I eat so differently now.  Once I had meat in my sauce and I would eat a piece, not knowing what animal it came from or what part of the animal, and then suck the rest of the meat and flavor off the bone before throwing it onto the ground next to me.  (That’s where the trash goes.  On the ground).  

Toh is really hard to describe.  I’ve been trying for a week and a half to fit a description to it.  The best I can come up with is that it’s kind of like eating a thick flour and water paste.  It’s gooey-ish and comes in a big bowl and you pull pieces off with your hands and dip it in a sauce before eating.  The sauce is made of okra, and is green and has the consistency of snot.  My friend Jeff calls it booger sauce.  The taste of the toh is pretty nonexistent and the sauce taste isn’t bad, but if you look at, or think about the consistency, it kind of kills the flavor.  Even many Malians don’t like toh, but I guess it’s a pretty common dish in the villages.  Most of my friends only have it every now and then, if at all, because they told their families they don’t like it, but since my stomach didn’t complain, I haven’t either, so I usually eat it once a day now.  I’m pretty used to it, and last time I ate almost my entire half of the bowl.  It’s just kind of a bummer when you realize dinner is toh again, especially knowing my friends are often getting french fries and fried plantains.  Twice now my aunt has made me fried potatoes for an after-dinner snack and both times it was glorious!!!

Also, my dad and uncle have apparently decided that I don’t eat enough (they tell me every meal to eat more so I can get fat), because they are constantly buying me fruit.  I get sooo many bananas and oranges.  Sometimes they go bad because I can’t eat them fast enough, and no one in my family will take food from me, the guest.  Also, I can’t really peel the oranges (they’re WAY harder to peel than our oranges), so unless someone in my family does it for me (which often happens), they’re kind of a lost cause.  (Useless Americans, lol).  I'm really glad they're over-fruiting me rather than under-fruiting me, though.  It's a nice break from rice and toh.

I guess that’s about it for my daily life and family.  Hopefully you have a general idea how my life is working so the rest of my stories-to-come will have some context.  More to come soon!