Yogi Likes Riz Gras...and other food-related adventures

So tonight the rice lady had riz gras! Yogi about flipped. He wasn’t that interested in the rice, but maybe it was because he was full from all the veggies on top. There was manioc, eggplant, bitter eggplant, okra mash and a little piece of fresh fish. At first I thought he was going to leave the okra mash but he ate it! My dog likes vegetables. Is that weird? At one point he was eating so forcefully that he flipped a little splash of piment in his eye (I had removed the piment to prevent an accidental wolfing down of it which would inevitably end in cries of pain). He started dancing around and putting his paw up to his eye. I was burshing my teeth and laughing at him. Is that mean? I’ve had piment in my eye PLENTY of times. It was just funny to see a dog reacting in the same way.

So the fumigator dude is up in Ian’s village today and tomorrow and I’m leaving for Conakry on Saturday so he can’t come get rid of my chicken bugs until I get back, which won’t be until next weekend. Bummer. But hey I’ll have him do it right when I get back and then maybe they’ll be gone! YAY!

So everyone in my village keeps asking me if I am doing the month of Kar’em. I tell everyone, “of course!” with a guilty look on my face and the people who know me better know I am just humoring them. It’s just easier to say you’re doing it and then they’re like, “good!” Cause if you said you weren’t doing it you’d have to spend five minutes explaining why NOT. So it’s just easier. And I AM doing the evening prayer and meal AND going to mosque on Fridays so I’m sort of doing some of it.

I have to meticulously hide any eating I do in my house. It especially sucks because I don’t like to cook in there right now because of all the bugs. So I try to do really simple stuff as fast as I can and just not think about the bugs swimming in my tomato sauce and eat quickly before they descend on my plate. Today I made a pretty good tomato sauce without a recipe. It always comes out too oily. I use too much oil when sautéing the garlic and onions. And it would be awesome to add mushrooms into the mix. Next time I just have to remember to drain the oil before putting in the water and tomato paste. And the other day I made a salmon-onion-mayonnaise sandwich (thanks for the salmon, dad!!). It was way better than I thought it was going to be.

I saluer-ed Ian’s friend in the market today and like everyone else he asked if I was doing Kar’em and I said “of course!” And he asked if I was praying and I said yes. And he said how many times a day? I said once and twice on Fridays. And he gave me this superior look and said, “Ousmane Bah is praying THREE times a day!” EFF YOU IAN .

So today I was talking to my friend Ousmane II because I wanted to know if he was going to go back to Conakry on Saturday or not. He borrowed my phone and hiked for hours the other day to get service and said that everything was ready for him in Conakry so he could go. But he doesn’t have money for the transport. So it turned into this whole discussion and what really turns out is going on is that he has been waiting for this dude that said he was going to lend him some money to start “reselling” (which is how LOTS of people make their money here, I mean it’s basically what all the boutiques do, let alone the guys who resell gas out of liter gin bottles on the side of the road), but the dude keeps saying, “wait.”

He says he wants to go to Conakry just for the week like me and “get affairs in order”. I tell him this is a stupid idea. He would be wasting 3x the money on transport if he did this because instead of paying just once, to get back to Conakry, he’d have to pay twice to get to Conakry and once to get back to the village. I told him he should not go back to Conakry until he can go back to stay. He had NEVER realized how much money it would waste to do it his way, all he thought about was that there were people in Conakry he could get (borrow?) the money from.

Then I told him he should stop waiting for this dude who says he is going to lend him money because let’s face it, he probably isn’t, and even if he does, who wants to be beholden to someone else? I tell him that in the US, if we can’t find work doing exactly what we want to do at any given time, YOU STILL WORK. You find whatever way you can to make money while you are waiting. I teach him the phrase, “time is money.” He seems to understand that. I tell him he can keep waiting for this guy to come up with the money but while he’s waiting, why doesn’t he MAKE SOME OF HIS OWN money. This thought has never occurred to him before. That even if it is “petite a petite”, any money you make while you are waiting is still putting you ahead, even if it’s only a few mille. Why waste your time waiting? He is having a freaking epiphany.

Then we start to talk about some ways he can make money. The first thing I bring up is Ian’s coffee scheme, in that people grow coffee in terrace lines on the mountainsides, which will help their rice, harvest the coffee and ship it up the road to the market just inside Senegal where they can sell it for BANK. Because Senegal is on the CFA, and let’s face it, is in a lot better shape than Guinea, and coffee is in high demand up there. I tell him even if he doesn’t have the time to grow the coffee and set up business like that, he can just go to the bigger city south of us, buy coffee from farmers there, take it up to Senegal and still make a ridiculous profit simply transporting and reselling coffee. Yeah, he’d make a LOT more money if he was growing the coffee, but a shorter term moneymaker would be in just the reselling.

The other things I suggest is stuff he can do in Conakry, like the transforming and repackaging of products like making jam and dried fruit, which he could sell for big profits during the no-fruit seasons (like right now). I also tell him he could work in the village with the builders or carpenters or fence-makers and gain that skill then go back to Conakry where he can make more money doing that very thing, a recommendation letter from his boss in hand. This has never occurred to him either.

Basically I tell him not to just sit around and wait for something to fall into his lap, which is what I feel is a lot of the problem with poverty and development in Africa. People are just waiting for something to fall into their laps and it doesn’t work like that. Unfortunately many of the NGOs who work here operate in just this manner: they just give stuff away without making sure it’s really needed or really sustainable and it’s bred this plague of an attitude that if you just sit around doing nothing for long enough, Allah will provide. If Guinea keeps going on like this, they’ll never pull themselves out of poverty. And that’s the whole point: they need to pull THEMSELVES out, not wait for a lifeline from some faceless outsider. But I guess there are some Guineans you just have to TELL that to and then they finally understand. Like my friend Ousmane II. After our discussion today I think he is really motivated to get off his butt and make some money so that he can have what he calls “a real life”. More power to him. I hope he inspires others. That would make it sustainable .