Today would be best described in terms of food and beverage, illustrating my daily struggles with being a native English speaker and une végétarienne ("qui mange aussi des poissons"/"who also eats fish") here in Bamako, Mali.
When I woke up this morning I grabbed a boiled egg for breakfast, my lunch, and 2 Marathon bars, one for me in case of protein emergency and one for Berthé the chauffeur. These came from the impressive arsenal that Mom insisted I stock for the trip; no lie, these things are probably what cost the hundreds of dollars in excess baggage fees.
Once I got to the Keneya Ciwara office (where I've been the past 2 days), Mme. Touré la secrétaire offered me a cup of tea and asked if I wanted sugar or honey...yet after I agreed to sugar I couldn't translate the word "enough" to French fast enough! Five tablespoons later, I had myself a nice mug of insect attractant.
My pack lunch consisted of the beans I had made last night, being that it is too risky to depend on vegetarian dishes at the restaurants at work. However, I was not looking forward to eating the beans because, even though they were well seasoned thanks to the Zatarain's I so crucially brought from home, they were still very hard. Bremen my roommate had only a few meals earlier expressed his concern that we were running low on gas in our knee-height gas tank, and so I didn't have it in me to boil them for the full hour they needed.
Around 10AM, David, my Cameroonian boss, announced that we would be traveling to the rural village Bougouni for a Ciwara d'Or mission -- a.k.a. getting signatures for budgets. Oh what a world it is without fax machines! He told me it'd be about an hour away, so I calculated we'd be back around 1:15, which is ideal under-cooked bean hour. Five of us piled into a truck, the youngest (me) sitting in the spot named after the female dog, and away we went.
About an hour into the trip, which should've meant the trip was over, we had only just gotten out of Bamako proper due to "embouteillage"/"traffic." Another hour later, dozing off while trying to avoid the sticky heat from touching legs with other passengers, I got hungry. I whipped out my Snickers-brand Marathon bar without thinking, but then remembered that chocolate is a rare commodity here in Africa and (I hate to say it, but regretfully) offered it out to the other four in the car.
In Bougouni another half hour later, 2.5 hours in total, it was a circus. We drove back and forth from the community health center to the community president's office, about a 45 second drive each way, trying to get signatures, discuss future plans, women's groups activities, etc. The sun was beating down and all the climbing in and out of the car was really taking its toll on me. We bought oranges on the street, even though they should be called "greens" here because of their coloring, and the orange seller took a knife to peel them. Their peels had to be more than 1 inch think so while there was lots and lots of rind to be eaten, there was really very little actual juice and pulp, which at least provided me with some of the fiber that I could've otherwise gotten from my rock-hard beans.
We finally finish the business aspect of our trip and hunted down a restaurant around 3PM. They claimed to have no food, but upon further probing they brought out the Malian rice and "peanut sauce," which I've decided should really be called "chicken and gravy." I try to down some rice with chicken sauce but found ingesting it even more difficult than using their bathroom in the back, which was basically just a hole in the ground in a pitch-black shack.
Despite the food debacle the whole way through, I did love the excursion. The drive was relaxing with vibrant scenery. There was a sign for each village upon entering, no matter how small, and the same sign with a red slash mark through it once you were leaving. In between these tiny villages we were driving through what seemed like the middle of nowhere, but then you'd see people walking or riding donkeys in that nowhere space with obviously some place in mind.
I had one place in mind for when I got home: the refrigerator.
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