Bobaraba

A few months ago, a neighbor's dog gave birth to an adorable litter of puppies that I admired from afar. A few weeks later, the people I share a courtyard with brought one home. When he first arrived, he was cute and soft, like puppies should be:



But they tied him up in the sun on a short leash without enough food and water, so he got really skinny. He cried a lot, and the neighbors still paid no attention to him. So, when I couldn't watch any more, I took him off the leash and started taking care of him. I was worried the neighbors would get mad at me for implying that they were neglecting their dog, but I don't think they cared one way or the other. Dogs aren't seen as members of the family here. Most don't get fed on a regular basis, and are never played with or exercised. I think their attitude is more as follows: If I want to feed him, that's great. If not, they'll do what they can.

I made him a bed out of a postal box, and a water dish from an old margarine tub, and the neighbors brought him over a plate:



Since then, he's gone through a really ugly big-ears phase:



and a really cute sleeping-in-his-box phase:



For Christmas I made him a chew toy out of some old clothes:



And now he's a happy dog. I buy him dried fish at market, and I brought him some dog treats from one of the fancy grocery stores in Bamako. I am bringing him back some hard-boiled eggs today so he gets nice and fat. He also has a squeaky toy that he mostly just likes to chew on, not so much to make noise with. Other than that, he likes to play with his littermates, who live in the area.

I had been wanting a pet here for a long time, but I couldn't justify doing it because I knew I wouldn't be able to take care of one the way I would want to. (Meaning, the American way. The Malian way is to let animals fend for themselves.) Life here is rough for everyone, animals included, and it's almost impossible to take care of them the way they "should" be. So I think this is a good compromise. He lives a normal Malian life with the added bonus of having a rich person to take care of him when she's around. And I don't have to worry about someone watching out for him when I'm out of town, because the neighbors know that he's ultimately theirs.

He's a good puppy. He comes when I call him, and he accompanies me to the well. He's been adventuring further and further from the house, too. Maybe someday he will come with me on my bike rides; I could always use the company. He's a messy eater and he digs holes in the ground, but he eats from my hand without biting and he likes to be scratched behind the ears. Dogs are the same everywhere.

People have been asking me what his name is. Most dogs here have the same names: Tupas, Patience, or Polici. Seeing as how he was not my dog, and because I couldn't think of anything, I just told people he didn't have a name. One can only go nameless for so long, though, so I finally gave him the name Butt Butt. It was the best I could do. And when I told the Malians his new name, they couldn't pronounce it. So I thought of something even better: Bobaraba. "Bobaraba" means "big butt" in Dioula and Bambara. There is a whole song about it, glorifying women's butts, essentially; very popular all over West Africa:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobaraba

Needless to say the Malians find this hilarious. And Bobaraba was born.

Let's Talk About [Food], Baby

…All the good things and the bad things that may be…

I think most people know that I spend a lot of time here thinking about food. I thought I’d try to turn that time into something useful. So, for the month of December I kept track of everything I ate, and took a lot of pictures. Here’s what I discovered.

Number of times I ate toh: 22. I don't hate toh as much as I used to, but the absolute worst toh I've ever had, I had this month. It tasted like eating millet stalks. We must draw the line between human and animal food somewhere; I think this was it.

Number of time I ate popcorn: 22. Breakfast almost every day, thanks to kernels available in San. Also, Clif Bars from home. 14 of them. Thanks, Mom!

Number of tea shots: 14. Tea is a way of life here. It's made uber-concentrated and loaded with sugar. Probably why I just found a cavity last week. The mark of a good tea-maker is whether he or she can master the "long pour". It gets impressive. See here:



Other drinks: 21. Sounds like a lot of drinks, but when compared to the amount of water I drink, it feels like nothing. Malian-made drinks are available at market, frozen in plastic bags. Drinksicles!

Number of times I ate fruit: 27. Gotta love cold season! It’s the time of papaya, watermelon, oranges, guavas, and bananas. Too bad they’re only available on market day, one day a week. But that day and the two days after are always good days.

Number of times I had meat: 37 (26 at site). This is a huge number for most Malian households; most cannot afford to have meat on a regular basis. (Although in my defense, it’s not usually very good. Mostly goat. But the family I eat with most of the time is Catholic (in a predominantly Muslim country), so I have the fortune of eating pork more often than most volunteers.)

Number of vegetables: 32. Once again, thanks to cold season. Lots of salad, cabbage, and sweet potato (is that a vegetable?). Vegetable seasons come and go here. During cold season (the Malian winter), my homologue makes salad every Thursday (kind of the Malian equivalent to a pizza Friday in the US). It’s a pretty great thing. She makes the salad with sweet potato, bread chunks (sometimes they’re really stale; I pretend they’re croutons), tomato, and a vinegar-oil-salt sauce.

Number of times I had beans: 4. This is very sad. See my last post for my thoughts on beans. Bean lady made only one appearance last month, and I haven't seen her since. But bean night lives on! And the kids get so excited, they can't even wait for me to take a picture for my food journal (which I explained to them and they seemed to approve of):



My best meal at site: There is a magical food here called wijila. I've only had it twice in my time here, and both times it came as a total surprise. I can best describe it as a really dense dumpling. It's delicious. We're not much one for food presentation in village, but may I present to you, wijila, with pork and some sort of sauce:



Christmas lunch: I spent Christmas Day in Fangasso to see what a Catholic holiday was like. I'll write a real post about that soon, hopefully. But in terms of food, our lunch was much above par. I bought cabbage, sweet potatoes, and watermelon to share with the family, and my homologue made rice and pork, with delicious results:



Christmas dinner, however, was the following:



That rice look familiar? Leftover from lunch. Cold! With porridge on the side. I just had the porridge because I ate so much at lunch, so there wasn't much loss. But I was sad to see such little celebration on one of the biggest holidays of the year.

Biggest accomplishment: Ethiopian meal of pumpkin-tomato stew, spiced lentils, and potato-cabbage stew. Many of you know of my love for Ethiopian food, but I have never attempted making it myself. It was time-consuming but I had a lot of help from my "sous-chef," Tom, who is actually a far more accomplished chef than I will ever be, and did most of the work. But it turned out well! The bread was difficult to make (I had my mom send special flour from the US), but all in all, pretty good for a first try, if I do say so myself:



Biggest failure: I went to the dairy in San to buy milk and walked away with soured cream without realizing it, thanks to language issues. (The sign was in French, but the seller spoke only Bambara, and I speak little, so...) I put it on my cereal and didn't realize it wasn't milk until it was too late. Waste of Crispix.

Dairy: 15. We've found ice cream in San! Best thing a PCV could ever find. Otherwise most of this "dairy" is Laughing Cow cheese, which is the only cheese to be found in San area. Goes well on toast or when mixed with tuna, available for purchase at fancy stores in San.

Breads: 9. I love cold season for many reasons, partly because fresh foods like bread last a lot longer. I have a friend who sells bread at market, and he gives me a little extra whenever I buy some.

Rice and sauce: 12. Not much special here. Has definitely lost its charm. I think I prefer toh now! It always depends on the sauce. Peanut butter sauce is the best! But it's a rare thing in village.

Other foods that made an appearance during the month of December: coucous, macaroni (every type of pasta here is called macaroni, in any language; this time was more like spaghetti, Mali-style, where the sauce is boiled into the pasta as opposed to being put on top), tortellini and gnocchi (again, thanks to Mom), and a fair amount of junk food thanks to other volunteers' packages, so generously shared in San. I spent six days away from site in December (in San) so some of the foods listed here were eaten in San (Ethiopian and ice cream as prime examples), because we always make an effort to cook good food when we have the chance.

I thought my food situation in Mali was pretty grim, but looking at the results of this "food study" have shown me that it's not so bad. I am lucky to be able to buy nicer foods in San to bring back to site, and I rely on them quite a bit. I still eat two meals a day with my host family, at their mercy. But I choose my own snacks and breakfasts. So, all in all, not so bad. And mango season is around the corner! Soon we will be drowning in them. Being a PCV is all about living like your community lives, but we all have a little advantage over our Malian counterparts. Some they know about, and some they don't. But even if I could make delicious food for myself, I would still eat with my "family" twice a day. There isn't much food culture in Mali, but sharing a meal is still a good way to spend time with people.

All for now!

When In Mali, Do As the Coulibalys

I’d like to take a moment to talk about food. (Again/still). Picture, if you will, a quintessential American food, one that has the power to define the nation. Is there any one food that comes to mind? I’d argue that there were too many to choose from (and I don’t like to think about it too much because then I get hungry and start craving cheeseburgers), but such a food exists in Mali. And no, it’s not the all-evil toh that I’ve anguished over, but rather: beans. Can’t say I was particularly enamored of beans in the US (except black, in my Chipotle burrito bowl), but here I simply cannot get enough. Many Malian foods I am simply not down with, but I definitely side with my host country nationals on this one.

Beans are somewhat of a luxury food in these parts. It’s always a special thing when they make an appearance at my homologue’s—we’re talking three or four times in the last year. Reason being, the average village family doesn’t grow a lot of beans; rather, they focus their energies on growing and harvesting millet. Millet grows well in harsh conditions, can be stored for long periods of time, and easily be prepared for mass quantities of people in the form of toh. Beans aren’t a priority crop, but might be planted as a treat along with peanuts, corn, and rice.

I can’t remember exactly how I fell in love with beans here (is my life sad?), but I think it started because they are available, ready-to-eat, on the street most mornings and nights in San—a perfect option for those of us who are less than adept in the culinary arts. They are served any which way, except for the way that probably makes the most sense to Americans: with rice. Paired with rice, beans make a nutritionally complete meal, but it seems that Malians will have none of that. Rather, they are served with an excessive amount of oil poured on top (and by excessive I mean that there will usually be a pool of oil at the bottom of the bowl once the beans are gone). Once I bought beans for my homologue’s family, but did not bring the oil, and they took great offense; the two are inseparable. And, somewhere along the way I discovered that they are delicious when cooked in sugar water, or with sugar poured on top of the final product. It sounds gross, but trust me.

Beans come along so rarely in my family setting that about six months ago I started taking matters into my own hands. I started going over to a friend’s house once every couple weeks for what I now affectionately refer to as “bean night”. It’s the best night ever, no exaggeration. I buy 80 cents’ worth of beans at market, which is enough to feed the two of us, her two children, her husband (when he’s there), the occasional guest, and then some. She boils them with sugar and makes an onion sauce with chicken bouillion and the required oil to be poured on top. I see her nearly every day, and sometimes get greeted with “When are we going to eat beans again!?” rather than “Hello”. Goes to show they love the meals as much as I do. I think each one of us thinks we’re getting the better deal.

And then one afternoon in my village, a magical thing happened: a woman appeared at my door with a giant bowl of cooked beans for sale, in any quantity of my choosing. I do not lie when I say that this was literally one of my Malian dreams come true (I dream about food a lot). And, to make things better, it kept happening. She now comes a few mornings a week with beans for sale. They make an awesome breakfast. I’m always a little sad when she doesn’t come on any given morning. And, aside from their role as a tasty treat, beans play an important role in Malian culture. Believe it or not, they have the power to smooth over tense situations and arguments, serve as an appropriate greeting, and more. Why? Because everyone loves a good fart joke.

On any given day in Mali, the following conversation happens hundreds of times:

Hello.
Hey. How are you?
Good. What’s your last name?
I’m a Coulibaly.
Ah! You eat beans, huh?
No!!
(resume normal conversation)

And so on and so forth. It’s like a recipe for instant friendship. The running joke of the country is that anyone with the last name Coulibaly (literally millions of Malians—a very popular name) eats beans (fart joke implied and understood by all). Upon meeting someone for the first time, the last name is often requested before the first, and the joke ensues. But don’t go thinking that anyone can say that to anyone—that would be chaos. There is a strict set of guidelines for who and given family can joke around with. The Dembeles can joke with the Diarras and Kones, but not the Traores. Dembeles and Traores are equals; a bean joke would be out of place. And it complicates from there. The joke serves as a good ice breaker but can also break the tension in awkward or difficult situations. For instance, remember the World Cup referee who made the infamous call against us last year? He was a Coulibaly. I can’t imagine the jokes that got made here about his job performance and personal character. That’s what he gets for being a bean eater.

People around the world participated in Hunger Awareness Week from September 11th to 17th of this year. The observer’s goal was to eat for less than $1 a day, the global poverty income line. I myself did not actively participate, but I’m sure I made the cut most days that week. It’s fairly easy to accomplish here, but nearly impossible to imagine in a country like the US. The goal of Hunger Awareness Week is to draw attention to global food insecurity, but participation is a big commitment to ask of someone in a developed country. I didn’t ask friends or family to participate because, quite frankly, it seems unrealistic. Even for me. Yes, my Malian friends live off little and eat a lot of toh, and yes, I eat with them. But I always have an ace in my pocket, the ability to buy as many healthy foods as I can carry at market, supplemented by treats sent in packages. I never have to seriously worry about where my next meal is coming from, or how the harvest will be this year, as a matter of survival. But many Malians do. I joke about beans, as do Malians, but in it’s in spite of the fact that the food situation is much less than ideal here and in many parts of the world.

I don’t ask you to stop treating yourself to Starbucks or new shoes because of the proverbial starving child in Africa. Food security isn’t about the unequal distribution of wealth in the world, or at least not solely. You taking your latte money and making a donation to a food charity would help temporarily, but doesn’t change the heart of things at the end of the day. The solution to food security is miles away, obscured even to the experts, but your awareness of the issue can be a step in the right direction. Thanks for listening.