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! 

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.

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. 

Fête Noël

I spent Christmas in Popenguine, a little beach town just south of Dakar, it was wonderful, and here are a few of the highlights. 

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!