Without many shops or produce in our part of town, we relied heavily on the Monday market. At first it was an exhilarating headache. There were so many different things to buy to supply us until the next week in an unfamiliar sea of commerce with unforgiving crowds. It was beautiful, though. At first, the endeavor would take at least a couple hours with two people. By our fourth week, I was navigating the maze of stalls and women on mats alone and finishing in under thirty minutes. I would have to take Jonathan’s backpack with me, and fill it nearly to the brim with about 50 pounds of food and produce. Onions, tomatoes, rice, groundnut paste (peanut butter), oil, oranges, mangoes, bananas, pasta, sugar, salt, spices, tea, garlic, etc. We weren’t paddling every day anymore, but we kept the same appetite.
Blai always loved going to the market because it was like a fashion show. Not for him, I mean; he still wore the same flower print shorts torn blue shirt as almost every other day. But the women get dressed to go shopping at the market like they get dressed up to go out on Friday night back home. Not the same styles, but it is the best opportunity to show off how good you look. And they looked beautiful in their colorful tailored clothes with their endless array of new creative hairstyles. Blai would walk around, forgetting about tomatoes and onions, eyes wide open, mouth agape, whispering to me, “Toma ya! Did you see that girl? She was beauuutiful!”
Pork
During our search for honey wine in the Christian part of town, we happened upon the other luxury that only Christians can offer in a Muslim country: pork. We visited the pig farmers and it was pretty obvious why so many religions forbid eating these animals. They were disgusting. They smelled awful and ate a slop made from the leftover mash from millet beer production. On the other, hand, we knew they would be delicious.
We returned the following Saturday, when they would slaughter a few pigs and sell them to the local Christians and Animists that like to indulge. We were happy to find that it was the cheapest form of protein available at $2/kilo. We each bought a kilo to fulfill each of our own dreams. This was a big deal for us, as we hadn’t eaten anything pig-related in months.
At the pork vendor, we met a guy who thought he was talking smooth, but quickly revealed himself as a two-bit hustler. I didn’t respond to him at all, but Blai has no problem engaging these guys. He asked what neighborhood we were living in, and instead of saying “Sebougou” Blai quickly responded, “Sex beaucoup”, which in French sounds like Sebougou, but actually means “much sex”. The guy never caught the joke, as Blai frequently mentioned “much sex” throughout the conversation as Jonathan and I tried to contain our laughter behind him.
Buying the pork. Photo Credit: Jonathan Diarra
Blai made a wonderful pork stew the first night, while I marinated pork in lime juice, chilies and cumin overnight. The next day, I made a version of puerco pibil, a slow-roasted pork, my favorite Mexican dish. Jonathan packed his pork in salt, then smoked it. He was successful in preserving the pork so we didn’t need to refrigerate it, but one small piece of it could salt a meal for all three of us.
Jonathan's pork-smoking setup. Photo Credit: Jonathan Diarra
Puppies
Somewhere in the middle of February Blai’s dog, Fura, finally gave birth two twelve little bundles of half Spanish half Moroccan joy. I am not much for dogs and cats, but jeez, they were cute. For the sake of Fura, though, Blai decided it would be best to “put some of them away”.
I wasn’t paying much attention, but had an idea of what was going on. It seemed wrong to me, but it wasn’t my dog or puppies. I watched as Jonathan and Blai walked out the door with a big squirming grain sack.
Later, when swimming or bathing in front of the gardens near our house, I would occasionally almost step on the sack, submerged in just a few feet of water. They hadn’t thrown it out nearly far enough.
Puppie Portraits are going to make me famous. And there is a lot more where these came from.
Salad
I am not much for salad, but when it is staring at you from your front porch all day, it seems silly not to eat it. We would regularly go to the women that tended the gardens near our house to buy salad. 100 francs for a huge mess of lettuce, 100 more for carrots, 100 more for little onions, etc. We could also get some lemongrass, mint and ginger for tea or cooking. For under a dollar we could have a huge salad, picked fresh that day. Sometimes Sebougou seemed too perfect.
The gardens in front of our house.
Water-Getting’
Getting drinking water was a necessary evil. The nearest water pump was at least half a km away, which by African standards is not bad, and we only used the well water for flushing our toilets. For us, though, it was something new to walk that far for such a basic necessity. Jonathan and I got used to it quickly, but Blai, always quick to work smarter not harder decided after a couple weeks that this was not for us. He would always keep an eye out for the local kids and their donkey cart, then run out and see if they could go get our water for us. He would pay them the 100 francs to pay at the pump (a franc per liter) and give them 100 francs for their time.
As much as we were living simply by our western standards, it was moments like this that would knock me back into the reality of Africa and how much richer we really were. Another one of these moments was realizing that our bags of garbage on the porch would always disappear when we weren’t looking. It quickly became apparent that the local kids were nabbing them and searching them for recyclables. We later came across a pile of our garbage, to find that we actually produced little of use to them beyond the plastic bag. But that bag was always taken.
Swimming
There was a broken down pirogue not far from ours. It had been slightly torn apart, either from weather, or for use as scrap wood. We heard that a couple years ago, the boat had capsized in the river, spilling all nine passengers into the water. Every one of them died. I know it sounds unbelievable, as the Niger is no raging river. And even if it is not true, it wouldn’t shock me. Africans have a reputation for not being keen on swimming. This is more based on anecdotal evidence in both Mali and Ghana, and from others who have traveled Africa, rather than anything scientific.
We always noticed that nobody was ever in the river past their waist or maybe shoulders. Other than the few guys who dive to the bottom of the river to retrieve sand, we never saw Africans swim.
So one day when we were working on the boat, and we had a big crowd of kids watching, I tried to get some of them in the water to swim. This was either to see if they could, or to teach them. They were intimidated, but I wasn’t sure if it was by me, or the water. They slowly crept closer as I summoned them into the water. They spoke no French, but they understood what I was playing at. None of them wanted to be the first to jump in. Finally a brave young boy, one of the bigger ones, stepped forward. I brought him to an edge, where the depth dropped from knee depth to eight feet, and took his hand and jumped over the edge. He panicked a little, but was able to doggy paddle back to where he could touch. Then, I grabbed him, as he gave me an approving look, and threw him in, and he swam back again. He looked excited, but I couldn’t tell if it was because he was swimming for the first time, or just to be playing with the strange foreigner he had been watching for so long.
Some of the other kids started swimming around in the shallow area, giving a pretty good effort at doing what I had shown them about how to move arms and legs. Eventually I got all the kids trust, and it turned into a giant hoist fest, in which the kids would just get in line and I would throw them about 8 feet into the air and they would plunge into the deep water, and paddle back to the safety of shallow water. Blai came around, and we teamed up to throw the kids extra high, letting them do flips into the water. The girls stayed on shore, and I tried to get them involved, but even at that age they had submitted to their place in society as passive observers of male tomfoolery.
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