Tea-Brewing Guards

Making and drinking tea in Bamako says a lot about Malian culture and patience. While Lipton-brand tea bags are commonplace around our office, it's loose Chinese tea leaves that are most often brewed in a small metal tea-pot over a coal fire. All around the city, groups of men are hunched in a circle around the coals, adding unequal parts leaves to water into the pot, 3:1 (by choice, not miscalculation!). The tea-makers will give the liquid a few breaks from the coal heat, standing up to pour the tea from a height into two shot-glass sized drinking vessels, then will sit back down to pour the glasses back into the pot. It’s a repeated, drawn-out process that occurs over what seems like hours; liquid is continuously steadied into the shot glasses and poured back in the pot.

Finally ready to drink, the first round of tea shots is strong and bitter: the Malian 5-hour Energy Shot.

The Malian tea pot: not much room for water with all those leaves!

After the jolting first batch is finished, more water is added for the second. The pouring and repouring of shot glasses continues for another drawn out period of time. While not as strong, this second batch still has a kick to it.

Water is then added for a third round of tea shots, which are given just as much time and attention. With sugar and now worn-out, wimpy leaves, you get a much sweeter, more satisfying result. It's like the jello shot to chase a couple rounds of whiskey.

Some rainy afternoons at work when I’m struggling to stay awake, I go outside and ask for a three-shot trifecta from the Care Mali "gardiens"/security guards, sitting around their own little coal fire at the front gate. Every time I get out there, they always have to ask, “Sali, tu vraiment veux prendre le thé du Mali? Pas Lipton?”/”Sali, you really want to take the Malian tea? Not Lipton?” And while I do prefer the later, sweeter shots, you gotta sign up for the whole package. "Bien sûr, je vais prendre le thé Malien!"

Tea shot glasses hanging out together, recuperating after a few rough hours together.

With tea pot + sugar in plastic bag.

Not a true Malian, and needing the hours it would take to make the tea to focus on my work, one of the guards will bring me one shot after the other throughout the afternoon.

“Gardien” is one of the top-ranking professions around Mali’s capital city. It’s up there with “le taxi-man” and the young men who sell “Orange” (the AT&T of Mali) phone credit. The Orange vendors get to wear spiffy neon vests and walk up and down the streets mid-traffic selling instant phone credit cards, comparable to the church collectors with fanny packs coming up to your car window on S. Claiborne in New Orleans. When it's not rush hour, these vested guys are sitting around making tea, too.

The guard(ien) uniform isn't as exciting: an all-brown full body suit, not unlike that of the UPS man. It has got to be miserable in this West African heat. That’s probably one of the reasons they're making tea all day long. Drinking hot tea helps cool you off by increasing the temperature of your innards relative to your brown, uniform-trapped outards.

Another reason the gardiens spend hours brewing green tea until it becomes the color of their uniforms? There’s not much to guard against. The southern half of this 90% Muslim country does not have a lot of crime. The strong family and neighborhood ties stigmatize any acts of crime, and the worst are punishable by the ultimate penalty: community exclusion or expulsion. The hardest I’ve seen a guard work is having to fuss at young kids playing football/soccer in the street when their ball gets too close to a nearby parked moto.

Thursday was the first day of the month of fasting called “Careme” here in Islamic West Africa, “Ramadan” everywhere else. A different cultural process of sorts I get to witness.

In theory, the practice is done to remind Muslims of what the poor must go through every day. Each day, they are supposed to feel the hunger pains of not being able to afford food to eat. It is a sort of grounding period designed to make individuals appreciate what they have.

In practice, it has become more of a “fête," an exciting festival. Entire families wake up at the pre-daybreak hour of 4AM to gorge themselves with a gigantic breakfast, and after a full day of no food, no drink, and even no chewing gum to help keep their minds off of the fact that they're famished, the whole family gets together again for another feast that has been prepared throughout the day.

The two eating periods include mass amounts of meat, mostly “mouton”/goat, and lots and lots of sugar. Yesterday, one of my co-workers picked up a 50-kg sack of sugar for $50. It is used to sweeten the dates that the prophet Mohamed once ate, and is added into the "boullee," a porridge-like mixture drunk at both meals. The white color of the sugary boullee signifies the purity of the Careme.

The amount of prayer to Allah is amped up, performed five times a day by even the less devout members who would normally spend more time brewing tea than praying. So while the message of starving yourself to become more minimalist has become starving yourself to have fun gorging at odd hours with your family, the prayer regime has at least remained stringent.

My "drinking" buddies les gardiens are now in full fasting mode. They’ve officially traded their brown tea for white boullee. Despite the 4AM and 7PM feasting, it can’t be a good month for them, and certainly not for me; yesterday I was struggling to keep my eyelids open without my 5-hour Energy Shot series. They'll be doing all their waiting around in a guard-like fashion with none of the chatty brewing, and I’ll only have Lipton tea bags to get me through the day.

It's time for all of us to say our prayers.