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Wednesday, September 8, 2010

How to "Treat" Homesickness

It’s true. The rumors are true. No need to hide it: I ordered a five pound bag of candy. I had five sugary delicious pounds of Haribo raspberry gummies shipped all the way here to West Africa.


A few weeks ago, my camera broke. I was prohibited from documenting any of my fun adventures in Mali to share with friends and family, and knew a replacement camera would take at least a month to arrive. Around this same time, my cousin Rebecca was getting married; my mom’s entire side of the family was going to be at her big fat Lebanese wedding without me. Also during this time, my cousin Katie, for whom I was recently the maid of honor at her wedding, gave birth to her first child Avery Lee. My dad’s entire side of the family was going to cheer her on, and all I could do was send her lame Facebook messages of encouragement. I had reached the zenith of my homesickness.


My brother Ben, who could sense my sadness, sent me a link to cheer me up: the “Back to School” berry sale at amazon.com.


He knows how addicted I am to crappy gummi candies. During my college volleyball days when we were required to write down everything we ate as the nutrition component to our training, I wrote down “orange slices” almost every week. I did not mean the healthy fruit version. I was regularly eating the sugar-coated stick-to-your-teeth candies you can find at the Circle K for 2/$1 -- my faithful study companions.


When I visited the link Ben forwarded, Amazon sweetly sang to me that for the knocked down price of only $12 (from the much higher price of $14.77), plus an additional 15% off (a whopping $1.80 cents added reduction!), you could get five pounds of the gummi berry of your choice. Fake sugar renditions of real fruit? My specialty!


Being at a weak point in my sub-Saharan life, I pressed “add to cart” and didn’t look back. I also added a berry-blue Panasonic Luminix camera; wish I could’ve gotten the berry discount on that purchase.


Now that the candy’s arrived, and I’m back in high spirits armed with a camera, what the hell am I going to do with five pounds of Haribo raspberries?!


My demise:


I packed a few ziploc bags chock full of the black and red sugary delights to bring to the office. On my way in this morning, I remembered that all my colleagues are still fasting. With my lack of self control, it struck me that I could very well put down this first pound of ziplocked raspberries all by myself. I had to get rid of them.


Walking to find a taxi, I was bombarded by kids asking “madame” for money. Fresh out of change and Tums, the raspberries were the perfect solution. The kids and moms were so enthusiastic, “bonbons madame, bonbons!” that I just grabbed a huge handful and gave it to one of the more responsible looking individuals for distribution and hightailed it out of that “rat king” (just learned this slang American phrase, you should look it up at your own risk).


Seeing that “les bonbons” were a big hit, and still needing to get them out of my possession, I offered a few to the taxi driver. He wasn’t interested, so I swung the plastic ziploc in front of the man in the passenger’s seat (having multiple clients in the taxi is normal practice). I asked him, “est-ce que tu veux du bon-bons?”/”do you want some candy?” and he moved his arm in what I thought was an effort to get some of these delectable treats.


But he wasn’t going for the bag -- he was just lifting up his arm to show me his hand. Only 3 fingers were showing, the rest of his hand was ace bandaged up. "Je suis diabetique"/"I’m diabetic," and had lost the last two of his fingers because of it. Diabetes is no joke here in Bamako, where both treatment and diet change are too expensive for most.


Candyman Liz committed a candy faux-pas, and was faced head on with what could be her candy-induced future.


Needless to say, I’m rethinking my previously planned ingestion of the next four pounds of these Haribo raspberries. Let's hope I don't get homesick again in the next two months. If I do, other sicknesses surely await me.

1 comment:

  1. lol i love this post. glad you're enjoying the "fruits" of my labor.

    ReplyDelete

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These blogs are written on personal accounts and opinions of my near and far away adventures, so far. They do not in any way reflect the thoughts and opinions of the organizations with which I work.

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