More Birthday Cake

I am pleased to share my birthday with Marielle, another Health PCV from my training group, and this year we had a remarkably delicious birthday celebration. With help from Jackie we made veggie spring rolls with peanut dipping sauce in the afternoon, and very tasty squash and sweet-potato soup (the secret ingredient was oatmeal, no joke) with double-butter garlic bread for dinner. 

Later in the evening we brought out the cakes (one chocolate, one double-Ghirardelli-chocolate) to be decorated, set ablaze, and blown out.

 

It was a great birthday and a very nice little break from village life. Even if you aren't fasting, Ramadan in village can start to wear on you a bit. Food is scarce during the day, dinner usually isn't ready until well after 11 o'clock at night, people are tired, and if you're not going to the mosque there isn't much happening in the evenings.

Experiencing Ramadan in Senegal has been really interesting, but it was also really nice to get together, speak some English, hang out around the kitchen table, play music, eat wonderful food, and catch up with people. We also took a bunch of with Katie, the other most recent birthday girl, and I modeled of my fantastic new shirts from my birthday packages.

 

Summer Birthdays! 

I obtained guests.

A couple weeks ago my neighbor Katie had a birthday and since she'd been traveling a lot recently decided to have a party out in village instead of slogging in to the Regional House. It rained quite a bit during her ride over to my place, so she wound up do a fair big of slogging anyway, but she made it safe and sound. 

Ramadan was in full swing so we had a discreet little mac & cheese lunch in my hut, and then PCVs Jackie and Jubal came in to celebrate with fancy hors d'œuvres (Laughing Cow "cheese" and salami gifted to us from a friend), hot chocolate, and cake. 

Katie blew out the candles on her Nutella-frosted loaf-cake (imported specially from Kédougou), opened her presents (cards, seed packets, candy, and her supply refills from the med office) and we watched a few episodes of Summer Heights High on my netbook. 

My host family likes it when I have visitors, especially Jubal because he's funny, plays music, and bring seeds, and kept popping in to say hello, exclaim that I'd obtained some guests ("Adama! A hebbi hohbé!") and ask good-naturedly which of us were fasting for Ramadan. (Jubal actually is fasting, but he's still drinking water during the day.) I like having visitors, too; all in all it was a lovely little evening.

Laare

Mango season is long over now, but there's been plenty of laare around for the past few weeks. Laare ("la-ray") is the Pular word for a super-sour fruit that grows on trees out in the bush. Most people like to mix it with sugar (which tastes kind of like SweetTarts candy), some mix in powdered milk (going for a CreamSicle-type thing I guess), some like to add salt (which tastes like something out of a tidepool) and little kids just eat it as is. 

I picked up a laare fruit at the weekly lumo market a couple weeks ago. It cost 25 CFA, or about 5 cents USD, and I bought a little 100 CFA sachet of sugar to go with it. 

I brought it back to my hut and cut it open. It isn't very hard to cut through; the skin is soft but the inside lining is a bit tough. At first it looks like it's a two-lobed fruit, but it's really just a bunch of pulp-covered seed packed in together.

 The part that you eat, the pulp, is slightly sweet and very tart. The longer you suck on a little seed-let (that's how I think of them, there may actually be a word for them) the more intensely our they become.

 The ridiculous sourness is why most people like to add sugar. I really don't get the salt thing, but to each their own.

 I ate some of the laare, spitting the seeds outside, and then gave the rest to few of my host brothers who were hanging out under the corossol tree near my host mom Mariama's hut. I think eating too much laare would give me a bit of a stomachache and also it's funny to watch the puckered, scrunched-up faces that the littler kids make while eating very sour things.

This reminds me of the monkey-brains
 in Indiana Jones.

American Gosi

Most evenings one of my host sisters or host moms will make gosi, a kind of rice porridge, to feed all the little kids (and me, sometimes) before dinner, since they often fall asleep early. I've had really bland, unappealing gosi at other people's houses, usually for breakfast, but the stuff that my host family makes is really good, almost like African rice pudding. 

The bland kind is thin and saline, made with just rice, water, and salt, and people usually eat it when they don't have enough money to add anything else. My host family is well-off enough to be able to make good, nutritious gosi, which is nice for me and great for the kids. My host sisters like to make gosi tiga, which is sweetened rice porridge with ground peanuts. The peanuts they use aren't roasted, so the flavor is mild, very unlike the roasted peanut buttery taste we're used to with American peanuts. The peanut meal thickens the porridge, giving it a rich, slightly nutty taste, as well as a big protein boost. My host family also likes to add kosam, a yogurt-ish sour milk, or a big scoop of powdered milk if they have some on hand to make it heartier and to add vitamins and protein; my host sister Mariama Kesso (whose daughter Fatou is the adorable chubby baby is so many of my photos) is fond of telling me that milk is a complete food, and that it's good for kids and mothers. 

So, my host sisters kept giving me these wonderful warm mugs of gost tiga in the evenings and I decided that I should try to make an Americanized version, something akin to rice pudding. I bought some rice, sugar, powdered milk, and brought raisins, vanilla sugar, and cinnamon in from the toubab store in Kédougou and told Kesso that I wanted help making American gosi . She thought that this was funny (watching me cook is endlessly entertaining) and everyone was curious - there are so many people on my compound (around 30 at last count) that I've never really tried to cook anything for everyone before. We boiled the water and added all the ingredients, let it simmer, and it thickened up nicely. Even though they made fun of the raisins a little (someone said they looked like "little goat poops") they liked it and ate it all. Raisins aren't available in my village and there doesn't seem to be a Pular word for them, so people kept calling them "little dates," which is pretty close. The Senegalese are known for having a big sweet-tooth and tend to really love dates, especially during Ramadan, since they're said to have been one of the Prophet's favorite foods. It went over really well, and made me want to cook more often. 

I also tried out adding a couple packets of Maple & Spice instant oatmeal to another batch of American gosi , but people were not into that. They were really polite about it, but apparently the maple flavor tasted weird and savory to them, like I'd added bullion or something. I was more than happy to keep that bowl for my breakfast, but it made me think about acquired tastes, and how strange it must be to try a new taste when you've only ever eaten from a very limited range of flavors.

Host sisters Kesso and Diabou

It was fun to cook with Kesso, and nice to share something American with my Senegalese family -- I told them that sometimes in America my mom and my grandma make rice pudding/American gosi, and they really liked that they were eating something that my family in America also eats. I think that I might get more ambitious and try making American-style spaghetti one of these days. It would be a mess to try to eat with a spoon, but since spaghetti noodle and onion sauce sandwiches are an accepted breakfast food I'm pretty sure that everyone would like it well enough. 

Les Parfums de Sénégal

Not long after I came to Senegal I was in a car with a few other PCVs, and we got to talking about what scents a Senegal-themed scented candle set would include. (I think it was April's idea.) In any case, I still think about that when I catch whiffs of  Senegal-specific odors. As best I can recall, here are some of the odors we identified as being the iconic smells of PCV life in Senegal: 

• Café Touba: at pretty much every bean sandwich lady's stand in the whole country you can buy hot, sugary little cups of Café Touba to go with your breakfast. (Many PCVs love it; I am not so much a fan.) It smells over-boiled and slightly peppery, like cloves and leaves and instant coffee.
• Fish Market: in most markets there's a section devoted to selling all kinds of fish - big, small, fresh, dried, semi-spoiled - and it always reeks of fish guts turning rancid under the most powerful heat lamp in the world. 
• Trash Fire: one of the least-lovely smells to wake up to. 
• Tea Time: the singed-sugar smell that comes from cooking up the scalding, hyper-sweet ataaya tea that many Senegalese like to drink int eh afternoons (and mornings... and evenings...) 
• Dust: it's subtle, just a light, hot, dry smell, but it's also everywhere, especially on transport. It cakes up on clothes and in sinuses and gets way down into the seams and cracks of everything, from books to keyboards to skin and hair. 
• Mango: fresh, sweet, sun-warmed and lovely, mangoes right from the tree are one of the few silver linings to hot season. 

Other suggestions were Overpowering Body Odor (particularly while crammed in a crowded bus or a station wagon with nine other people), Sewage Puddles (a rainy season fixture in all cities), and Adji (the bullion packets that are the base flavoring for nearly all Senegalese dishes we eat on a regular basis).

Maybe the candle set would look like this. 

Sadly, for me (and the other people in the room with me right now) Trash Fire would have to be the smell that I most strongly associate with living here. While away on vacation I stepped out of the car after being picked up from the airport and the first things I thought was "Oh wow, it smells so nice here." I've heard that repeated - unprompted and almost verbatim - from several other volunteers.

There are many other smells that spring to mind when I think of my life here in Senegal, many of them quite pleasant - babies all freshly washed and lathered in warm, nutty-smelling shea butter; sweet, floral "chourie" incense paste; the fresh-baked bread smell of tapalpa village baguettes. But really, Trash Fire tends to overwhelm them all. 

Celebration!

Typing "Celebration!" makes me think of that creepy town in Florida, but this post is all about birthdays and festivals that happened way back at the end of February. 

The first few photos are of the start of the Bassari people's Chameleon Festival, a week-long dance party that kicks of in the afternoon, goes late into the night. I hear it involves some pretty racy outfits toward the end of the festival, but I had to head out to Kedougou, so I didn't get to hang around and watch, even though my host father encouraged me to, saying "You're young, you can stay up late! I went to the Bassari parties when I was young, but now I'm older and have many responsibilities." 

Anyway, I gave my camera to my host brother Amadou, and he took a bunch of photos, including these:

Then we all got together at a local campement for Jackie's birthday. I made her a card, Jubal drew her a picture, and Tatiana got her some palm wine from the Bassaris. (I am not a huge fan of palm wine, it's sweet, slightly foamy, in a fermented-tasting yeasty way, and it doesn't help that it's usually room temperature. And room temperature can be pretty warm.)

A few days later (after a ridiculous, fly-ridden trip in to Kedougou) we came in to the regional house for meetings and then had a big Mexican-ish dinner to celebrate Jackie and C.J.'s birthdays. Meera and Meagan cooked up tortilla and beans, people lit candles (since we all conveniently came in right as a 3-day power outage struck), and Jess A., Jackie, and Meagan posed in front of the lovely table they'd laid out.

The food was delicious and, thanks to the blackout, the ambiance was all candle-lit and sophisticated. Or, as sophisticated as sweaty people in headlamps eating out of plastic bowls can possibly get.

After dinner it was time to decorate the amazing cake that Meera had baked. I made the frosting, but the actual icing of the cake was a team effort.

This has nothing to do with anything in Senegal, we just thought it was really funny.

In any case, the cake turned out to be really pretty (for rural sub-Saharan Africa during a blackout) and tasted fantastic (for anywhere) and a good time was had by all. 

Year of the Pull-Tab Soda Can

Sometimes it's the little differences that catch your eye. Is this some sort of retro-futuristic marketing ploy? Is this a thing in America now?

MERRY HAPPY!

Chrishaunakwanstice, Fancy Baking Day, Christmas Adam, White Elephant Night...  I love the holidays. And Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwaanza, and Tamharit, New Years' Eve, those are nice, too. 

This year I'll be spending Christmas in  Popenguine with some Peace Corps friends (including Emma and her family visiting from Amerik) and I'm sure that Christmas on the beach will be fantastic, but I know that part of me will be thinking of another West Coast. 

Family time, gingerbread houses and a Cheeseboard cheese platters... winter in California is generally pretty lovely, and last year was no exception. And now I'm feeling all nostalgic.

Merry Happy, Everyone!