comfort food

Currently listening to: River by Joni Mitchell

How time flies... I came into the city for a day because my fingers were itching to cook in a real kitchen. Apparently I've been craving fall/winter foods, even though the days here are still hitting 100ºs. I made a sweet potato cheese soup for dinner and pumpkin-banana spice muffins for dessert/breakfast tomorrow, when I head back to village, refreshed and exhausted from wandering around markets all day and playing in the kitchen for a few hours. Good day. So this is a rather long post, apologies for that - apparently I've had a lot to say lately. Let me know what you think.

Grief Revisited (11/15)
A few days ago, my host father's younger brother died. The sadness in his eyes that day was difficult to even look at. Faced with grief that strong, my (and I suppose all humans) natural instinct is to comfort. Culturally, my reaction is to hug, but Malians - as much as they are in physical contact - don't hug. I gave my host parents the death blessings and considered how we all try to comfort in times of grief. If I was home,t here would be cards, condolences, and casseroles. Mostly, however, we would gather and sit.

So here I am on the other side of the world, surrounded by people doing what people do for each other. The day of his brother's death, my host father's friends came over to sit with him and - though they have to leave for work and whatnot - have been there every day since. Today, my host father, his friends, and visiting family sit outside under a mango tree while visiting women sit inside under the hangar. Neighbor women have come over with food and are helping my host mother cook for everyone. They all sit and chat, drinking tea, their support in their presence.

I find it beautiful that our drive to comfort others crosses cultural boundaries, that I'm sitting at a mud house in Mali, West Africa, surrounded


Tuesday Night at the Movies (11/11)
Every Tuesday, right after I eat lunch, I take a small white pill with a very tall glass (*ahem* nalgeen) of water. It is the best insurance that the nasty little malaria babies in my liver won't migrate elsewhere in my body and make me sick. This itty bitty pill is also the reason my Tuesday nights have been dubbed "Tuesday night at the movies." Mefloquine, as all other anti-malarial drugs, has a curious repetoir of side effects, including depression, anxiety, paranoia, aggression, nightmares, insomnia, and seizures. On Wednesdays, I'm almost always dizzy. If I don't take my pill with a lot of food and water, my stomach cramps enough to keep me from really moving. But, like a lot of other people, mefloquine affects me most at night. 4+ months in, I've had a chunk of Tuesday nights where I wake up around midnight and spend the next 6-7 hours mostly reading because of insomnia. The rest of my Tuesday nights have been full of long, strange, vivid dreams from which I awake having to sort out what happened in real life and in mefloquine-dreamland. Consequently, Tuesday night at the movies.

For all of my funny dreams, I count myself lucky. Some people have had anxiety attacks; I know multiple people who have heard things at night, and one of my roommates at Tubaniso pretty much stopped sleeping for a while. That being said, my Tuesday night fun-times are starting to expand themselves. I now have multiple nights a week with dreams vivid enough that I confuse myself the next day as to what has really happened. I've woken up in the middle of the night with my heart in my throat because of a noise that my mind twisted into mice, lizards, or spiders coming to get me (this stems from the lizards that live on my roof and wake me up obscenely early, the very large spiders lurking in the corners, and the mice living in my house that my cat refuses to catch). Last night, I woke up with a start after something tickled my hand. I tried to calm my heart, positive that an infestation of cockroaches had appeared overnight and were living in my bed, though my barely awake self mumbled that I would deal with them in the morning.

I took mefloquine last summer with few effects and was a little disappointed that nothing more interesting happened. I expected this round to be the same, but now I'm starting to wonder, and to wish that I could go back to the less interesting part. If the hallucinations of cockroaches continues, we may have a problem.


"Surely, it's not what you do, but how you do it" (11/8)
So, I was having a conversation with my sister on one of my lucky internet days about the tendency to get frustrated with people for not doing more for themselves. My simple answer at the time was that I don't get frustrated with people for that because you really can't here. Since the conversation, the topic has kept edging into my thoughts. Thus, the blog post. I've decided to divide the issue into 2 broad directions - what you do to help yourself, and what you did today. I suppose I should note that these are still scattered, preliminary thoughts and any outside ideas are welcomed.

If you look up stats for Mali, you learn that it's considered one of the poorest countries in the world; most people here survive on subsistance farming. I've been conducting interviews with households in my village - when I ask people what they do, most will say farming first. If they have another position where they get a steady (if low) income, they will still note farming as their second job. Put simply, I've found myself in a place where everyone does something. In F., as in many parts of Mali, if you don't farm, you and your family aren't going to eat. It's an almost eerie feeling to contentedly watch the harvest come in, enjoying the enormity of it, and realize that the person standing next to you is looking at the same thing and praying - truly praying - that it will fill their children's stomachs all year long. In F., there are no beggars - who would they beg to? In Koutiala, the vast majority of beggars are young boys who are being given a (school) lesson in humility the hard way. That, of course, is not to say people don't ask me for money, a ticket to America, the clothes off of my back, the bananas I just bought, etc. - I am, after all, a Toubab - but most of those people don't actually expect something from me and will laugh with me while I say no (unless I'm having a bad day). Any adult I see today knows what real work is, and is about 10x stronger than me from that work. Right now, for example, my host father is out in the 100º+ heat, cutting millet because it has to be done now. Thus, there are no people in F. and a very few number of poeple in Mali of whom I question if they do anything.

The other hand, then, is not the question of "what are you doing with your life", but of "what the hell have you been doing for the last 3 hours and don't tell me just drinking tea." In this arena, some days I can laugh. Some days I can't laugh and to call myself "frustrated" wouldn't give my emotions justice.

First, I must explain tea. Each Malian household has a tea set with 2 little pots and a couple of shot glasses. Culturally, tea is very important - any meeting or gathering must include tea; when visiting someone, tea is an inexpensive but very respectable (and respectful) gift. Making tea the Malian way requires overbrewing green tea leaves, adding enough sugar to make any dentist cry, pouring the tea between the pots and shot glasses to mix and to create the desired level of foam (which, as far as I can tell, has no purpose but which I now admire - to my own chagrin), heating the tea up again while cleaning the glasses, and finally pouring each person around about 1/2 a shot of tea. Then you repeat this process 2 more times. Everyday. Needless to say, it takes some time. Coming from a culture where you can get almost anything 'to go,' it's been a challenge for me to learn to just sit and let the hours go by. But sit I do, meticulously cleaning my fingernails, which are ALWAYS dirty, and amusing myself by singing old girlscout songs in my head. Recently, I've learned how to make the tea myself, providing myself with a way to whittle away the time and my fellow sit-and-do-nothing-ers with some entertainment.

And here we arrive at the bane of many Westerners' existence while living in the area. W.A.I.T. - West African International Time (punny, no?) is something that we are all very familiar with. 'En Brousse,' everything happens on W.A.I.T., including my local bank. Let me tell you a story. I attended a meeting with the board of directors of my clinic not that long ago. 2, in fact. The first was supposed to start at 9:00 AM and got rolling around 10:15, after the tea set was found and someone had delegated who would prepare the tea. By 12:30, the board had met me, introduced everyone and their positions, and argued enough to come to the conclusion that they would decide things at the next meeting when they mayor could actually be there. The consequent meeting was supposed to start at 8:00 AM and got rolling around the same time as the first, after peanuts had been passed around and everyone introduced themselves again. Then, almost every person there gave a speech about this, that, and a lot of hot air (from what I could understand). At 1:00 PM, I left for lunch and didn't come back, though they apparently continued until 5:00 or so. The meetings, though important, easily could have been drastically shortened. Efficiency, however, is not a part of W.A.I.T. and not a strong suit of Malians. Good story, right?

This is the kind of situation where I can become easily frustrated. There are days where I do very little and can admit that it's because I was being lazy and really liked the book I was reading. There are also days, however, where I do very little because despite all of my trying, things just aren't going to happen and I might as well join the group of people drinking tea. Mornings can be fairly productive. But after lunch is designated tea-time and it goes down-hill from there. Men sit in groups, just to sit. Students from the local technical school can be seen wandering after classes alone or in pairs - kind of studying, kind of greeting people, kind of just walking. Slowly. Even women, who are ALWAYS working in Mali, will take hours and hours in weekly money gathering groups chatting, braiding hair, and drinking tea. Plus then you're already out so you might as well take the 30 minute walk to visit that one random person - and look! They've just started tea. We'd better stay until at least the second round.

It's taking time for me to get used to the idea that we don't do as much as we possibly can in one day, that we sit. I'll find myself thinking of all the things that could get done while we sit, which just leaves me aggitated. I'm (slowly) learning to appreciate just sitting, and to not schedule too much in a day - to barely schedule at all, really. Market days, for example, are in a town 6 km away. If I was functioning on American time-tables, I could leave F. around 8:00 AM , spend an hour doing my weekly shopping (with time to spare), grab a coke on the way out, and be back by 10:30. But then what the hell would I do with the rest of my day? As it is, I try to head out between 9:00-10:00 AM. I wander around greeting people I know in the market until I run into my host mom so we can do the weekly what-I-buy-for-the-family shopping together. Then we take that stuff back to her donkey cart, say our I'll-see-you-soons, and I wander back to some of the same market stalls to grab some stuff for myself. After that, I head over to the shop where my bike is kept to drink a cold soda and chat with people, and then head home at around 2:00-2:30 PM. It's a process. And that is what it all comes down to, and what I have to remind myself daily - it's a process. Being here makes me think it really was a good idea to have 'patience' tattooed on my foot.


A Few of my Favorite Things (10/26)
I eat with my host family every day except Saturdays (Sunday is market day, so the family meals on Saturdays are usually very bland and not-so-appatizing). I eat with them because it's hard to deal with only being able to get food stuffs once a week and not having any way of preserving it the rest of the week, because that way my host family gets more of a variety in their diet, because I'm 'busy' and kinda lazy, but mostly because it keeps me from sitting by myself too much and getting lonely. It can be easy to hole myself up and start down the dangerous path of "if I was in America right now...," so I generally try to steer clear of that. When I'm with my host family, or other friends in F., I may not understand them all of the time but at least I have a connection - something to keep me rooted here and now.

So anywho, for dinner I'll head over between 6:00-7:00, eat around 7:30, and play a round of Skip-Bo with my host mom sometime after. This, obviously, leaves a rather large chunk of time just sitting (as much of my days do), in which I meditate on my day. If something or someone upset me, I'll try to figure out the whats & whys so that it's less likely to happen again. If my temper flares or I become upset & agitated for no reason multiple times &/or days in a row, I'll make a note of it in my journal to keep track and make sure I'm not sinking into something bigger than I can handle.

A couple I know keep track of days they 'win,' in a them vs. Africa way; they do not note days when Africa 'wins' because that would be tragically depressing. There are times when I feel like Africa always wins, and there have been a few times where Africa has had me literally on my knees before 10:00 AM wanting home. Thus, during my night-time processing, I also make sure to think about what things made me happy throughout the day. Sometimes I make a list, no matter how small and insignificant the moments are, either because I'm overwhelmed by life and need a reminder, or because I'm overwhelmed by how good things are. Recently, I find myself having more positively overwhelming days, where I both wake up and go to sleep at peace with the universe. On those days, my thought is that if I'm still standing, still going and finding some enjoyment out of it, I've got to be winning, right?

So, without further adieu, tonight's list:
sharing a fresh coconut with my host-family - having a kitten curl up & sleep in the crook of my arm - fresh fruit - hammock - stargazing in a place without electricity for miles - peanut butter sauce & rice - clean laundry - feeling healthy - yoga - yogurt - conversing and joking in Bambara - cool breezes sitting under a mango tree - babies that aren't scared of me - a cup of tea in the morning - not using (or needing to) an alarm clock - building relationships - laughter - roasted peanuts - colors

Peace & Love
Elyse