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! 

Birthday Cake

It's my birthday today, and I've had a lovely time so far. I woke up and opened all the mail and packages that I picked up yesterday and was a little overwhelmed by how perfect and wonderful everything was; I am very, very lucky to have to many amazing people in my life. 

Amazing things from America

 One of the many lovely things that my friends & family in California sent was this cake, which (a little miraculously) survived the long journey, edible and intact. We assembled it, PCVs Chip, Ashleigh and Jackie lit the candles, and Katie took photos. It was all very adorable.

(Making an exaggerated making-a-wish face.)

Trick candle!

It was also only the beginning. It's my friend Marielle's birthday as well, and we've had a great time with everyone who came in to the Regional House today. We've been making spring rolls with dipping sauces, squash and sweet potato soup, baking Ghirardelli double-chocolate brownies and cakes with fancy frosting, and getting ready to finish watching Summer Heights High on the projector after it gets dark.

It really doesn't feel like I'm roughing it today. 

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.

Bowls

Bowls, like buckets, are a big things around here. We eat all our meals out of bowls, food is kept warm in lidded bowls, gifts and purchases of corn or soap or oil are delivered and carried in bowls. When women get married they're given bowls with lids and enamel pots in different sizes, and many women proudly display the fancier ones year-round, stacked up on shelves or tables in their sleeping huts.

Bowls are great, but everyone has pretty much the exact same ones, which can lead to confusion, especially during big events when lots of people are cooking and eating and carrying all sorts of things around in nearly identical stainless steel bowls. To keep track of things, most women like to paint their names and initials onto their bowls, usually with nail polish or whatever's on hand. Since I've been working with the other PCVs in my area on our little World Maps project my host family knew I had a bunch of little pots of paint on hand and my host aunt Hassanatou Bâ asked if I had any extra that I could use to paint her name on her bowls before she went back to Guinea for two months to visit her parents.

Hassanatou, posing for the camera. 

Hassanatou lives on our compound but I'm still not sure how exactly she's related to my host family, so I just think of her as my aunt. In any case, she is a very sweet woman; she thinks it's funny when I get things wrong, is happy to repeat herself two or three or nine times when I don't understand, and makes delicious sugary little fried dough beignets on market days. When I came back from my vacation I gave her a three-pair set of the earrings that my American family had sent with my for the women in my host family; she particularly loved the dangle-y one shaped like little golden leaves and she wears them every single day. Obviously, I was more than happy to paint her name on a few bowls.

Once I got started my host moms Saliou Dian and Mariama Souaré poked their heads into my hut to see how it was going. They liked what they saw, and asked if they could bring their bowls over, too. Pretty soon my hut was overflowing with bowls of all sizes, and with little host siblings eager to "help" with the painting. I let three of the older kids come in to do some painting and (aside from spilling paint on my floor and paint thinner on my floor mat) they were actually pretty helpful.

My hut, full of bowls. 

I made sure to use a different color for each woman's initials, for aesthetic purposes and because it makes it easy to tell them apart at a distance or in dim light. Since this bowl-name-painting-day I've been asked to do the same for the neighbors behind us and across the way, and am pretty sure that it will happen again soon. It's easy, it's fun, it hardly uses any paint, and it's nice to do something so immediately useful and delightful for people. 

Between the bowls and the map murals I'm pretty sure that there are a few people in my village who think I'm a Decorating Volunteer, sent over by the American Government to with a bucket of paint, a pack of brushes, and a mission to make things pretty.

Fancy paint for Saliou Dian, Mariama Souaré, and Hassanatou Bâ 

Lunch in my Hut

A few weeks ago I was working over at the Health Center, things went long, and I came home late for lunch. This happens occasionally, and when it does whoever cooked lunch (my host moms take turns, work-sharing is one of the big perks of the polygamous lifestyle) saves me a bowl of rice with peanut sauce (nine out of ten times lunch is rice with peanut sauce) and I eat it in my hut.

I always eat with a spoon. Most people on my compound eat with their right hands, but my host father, a few of the older girls, a few of the older boys, and I all eat with spoons. They switch back and forth sometimes but I've been told that "Americans eat with spoons, and you're American. Also you don't know how." Which is true, I've tried in other villages; it's a terrible mess, the sauce is too hot on my fingers and it feels awkward. So, my lunch comes in a bowl, with a spoon for me. Inside is more than enough rice and a smaller bowl of sauce.

    

According to good Senegalese mealtime manners, I portion out some of the rice, so as not to "ruin" it by getting sauce all over it, fluff up the remaining rice, swirl the sauce around, and pour it, all with my right hand only. In Senegal, as in many parts of the world, the left hand is the toilet hand  and is therefore considered unclean. (People here use water instead of toilet paper, kind of like a do-it-yourself-bidet, but that's another post for another time.)



In any case, after I pour the sauce I eat the rice, eating from the part of the bowl that's directly in front of me and only mixing one bite at a time. I add rice and sauce if I finish my first portion and am still hungry. Pretty often I've already been fed at the Health Center, but my host moms are good cooks and it's nice of them to save me food, so I eat enough to be polite, even if I'm not very hungry.

    

After I'm done I put the sauce bowl in the bigger bowl and cover it with the lid and the nice sauce-free extra rice and bring it back to one of the two kitchen huts. Sometimes one of the older kids will eat the leftovers as an afternoon snack, and sometimes they'll feed it to one of the little kids as a pre-dinner snack.



And that's lunch in my hut.

Happy Ramadan everyone!

It's Ramadan again! I wrote about Ramadan last year and about the things that people eat during Ramadan, so I won't go over the basics again. Last year, as a show of solidarity and out of curiosity, I fasted for one day, and I may do that again at some point. My host family understands that I'm not Muslim and wouldn't want me to actually do the day-long food-and-water fast for the entire month, both because it's not my religion and because they are (rightly, I think) convinced that I would probably get really sick if I swore off drinking water and eating during the day for four weeks. So, that means that, once again, I'll be stuck at the little-kid bowl at lunch time, or be given a bowl of ñankatonk (steamed rice mixed with dried okra, ground peanuts, bullion and hot pepper) to eat alone in my hut.

Really what's been on my mind, other than the terrible muddy state of our road, is my left big toe. Last December I injured it while biking in flip-flops (I know, I know) and a piece of the right half of the nail. It was doing a marvelous job of growing back in, right up until about a week ago, when it started to feel like the top right corner of the nail was in a knife fight with the top right corner of my toe. The Peace Corps doctor asked me to send her photos (see below) and then basically told me to soak it in warm water, keep an eye out for infections, be stoic, and just let it finish growing out. If I don't mess with it, it will sort itself out and I won't need to go up to Dakar to have them fix it. That's our hope, anyway.

My 4th of July polish is hanging in there. 

In any case, it's sunny and clear now, so the road is drying out. Tomorrow morning I'm going to head over to the garage and see if there are any cars going back to village. Until then I'll be hanging out on the Regional House porch, soaking my foot and trying to catch up on e-mail.

Hey, look at this thing I made.

Rainy season has begun in earnest, and that means long, damp afternoons spent in my hut, making tea, listening to podcasts, writing letters, and, most recently, sewing things. I've mended some tattered t-shirts, stitched up my mosquito net, hemmed some pants, and made a replacement pouch for my Diva Cup. (Most female PCVs here use menstrual cups because tampons and pads are not readily available. And also because they're pretty great.) It's been a long time since I sewed anything by hand, but I fussed around and pinned things together this way and that way and it came together eventually.

Tah-dahh

It was a challenge to make the stitching even, but I did remember to how to sew it inside out, line everything up, and measure it correctly. (Thanks Mom!) I was/am particularly proud of myself for making a functional drawstring to close it. Proud enough to show it to pretty much everyone who was hanging out at the Regional House, whether or not they had any interest in either arts & crafts or Diva Cups.



I also showed it to my host family; they were impressed, assumed it was a coin purse, and I didn't correct them. They also thought it was novel, a woman knowing how to sew. In Senegal tailors are almost exclusively male, and sewing is definitely considered a male activity. Not that anyone was offended, just a little amused, and now sometimes when someone on the compound needs help mending clothes or something they send a little kid to fetch me so I can come help, since I'm "very competent with the sewing."