Mango Mania

Perhaps some of you will recall how thrilled I was to be coming to Mali around mango season. And how much I anticipated all the mango trees ripening throughout homestay. How I excited I was when Moussa gave me my first Malian mango. Oh how times have changed!!

Don’t get me wrong, I still love mangoes. But holy crap, they are abundant in Mali! And since they grow on trees, and the trees apparently thrive here, anyone can go out and pick a million mangoes. Including the kids – especially the kids since they have the time and the enthusiasm to climb the trees and spend forever shaking them down. Mango trees are quite pretty, even when they aren’t bearing fruit. When they are, they look rather like Christmas trees from a distance. All green and pretty with big orange bulbs hanging from every possible branch. Just waiting to be picked an given to the toubab.

Right away when I moved to site, people started giving me mangoes. Djeneba brought me my original batch – a bowl full of 13 or so mangoes. I thought that would be great for the week, but I didn’t anticipate being given more mangoes – every day! I got mangoes from Djeneba, mangoes from her daughter, mangoes from her son, mangoes from her mom, mangoes from my neighbors, mangoes from the neighborhood kids, mangoes from people I didn’t know. I figured I was being given at least 7 mangoes a day, so even if I ate 3 a day (which seemed like a lot to me), I was still gaining at least of 4 a day – which very quickly adds up!! I was telling my dad about this and he asked how many I currently had, so I counted: I believe 37 was the final total. 37 mangoes. For one person. Is it even possible?!? I did lose some every day to overripeness, but it wasn’t enough to keep me at an even somewhat normal amount. I was throwing mangoes down my ɲεgεn, not knowing what else to do with them. After about a week, Djeneba came over and saw my mango bowl and said, “You aren’t eating your mangoes?” I responded that I was trying, but the kids kept bringing me more!! So she took pity on me and brought me 8 more. Just kidding. She did bring me 8, but she took away my bowl of several dozen and gave them to my neighbor. Before I left for Bamako I gave another entire bag full to my host family.

This went on for at least a month. Some days I’d get 3, some days the kids would come over with a bag of 15. One day I pawned off a good 20 to the Peace Corps staff who took us on a tour around San – my “thank you present.” I was so relieved when my mangoes were finally gone! Alima came over and said, “Your mangoes are gone?” To which I proudly responded, “Yup! All gone!!” Wrong answer. We were on our way to do my laundry. We left my clothes and buckets at the well and traipsed out into the fields, followed by the usual assortment of children, who then proceeded to climb the trees and fetch their 30 ft long hooked mango sticks and collect for me another 15 mangoes. I accepted them with a smile and a thank you, thinking, “Arrgh!! When will it end!?!?”

Perhaps the most confusing part of all this is that every day, women would sit next to the main road and sell mangoes. I kept thinking, who on earth buys them?!? All you have to do is send a little child out to a tree!! The best was when the women would come to my house carrying mangoes on their heads and ask me if I wanted to buy some. “No thanks, I have 30 inside my house. No seriously. I really do!”

Mango season finally seems to be over. I can still buy them from the women by the road, but they’ve stopped appearing at my door in the hands of small children. Next up: a fruit called becoum that grows on trees and is referred as “brusse grapes” (“bush grapes”) by the PCVs. Their season appears to have arrived, as they’ve started arriving en masse at my door via the kids. They’re a lot of work for a little bit of fruit, but the seeds are great to practice spitting, and other PCVs’ tents make great targets since the seeds stick to the tent walls.