Awful Day

Tabaski is like Chanukah: it goes on forever and I don’t get any presents.

Tabaski started on Friday when the sun went down. People stayed up all night. It then went on to Saturday, which was when I thought Tabaski was and thought the whole fete would go down. I mean, that’s when they killed Mr. Sheep. But no. It went on today, too. And I am informed we will continue through tomorrow and that there will be no market in Nossombougou so my plans to buy piment, have keke for lunch with a frozen baggie of bissap juice and spend the afternoon reading over a glass of red wine at the Auberge, flirting with the possibility of the English-speaking Bible Study folks showing up again has been thwarted. This was the first bad news of the day.

So I made a valiant effort today. I got up at 6:30ish, took my bath, and went out into the courtyard with the last 50 pages of Barack Obama’s “The Audacity of Hope” unread under my arm. I proceeded to sit out there with the family, do the mass breakfast thing at about 8 with everybody (rice with peanut sauce – SCORE – turns out that was the best part of my day) and stay out there hanging out with the grandmas and stuff until like 1pm. Then mom #1 Seli tells me we are gonna go hang out with the ladies. And I’m like ok fine. It can’t be for that long because lunch is at like 2 (during Tabaski. Normally it is at 12). So we go hang out. I have to take off a little before 2 because I have to go to the bathroom and when I’m done it’s time to eat. But it is disappointing because it is this giant, football sized tuber that is absolutely tasteless all cut up and cooked with stuff (I dunno what) so I don’t eat very much and think longingly of peanut sauce. Or even toh. So then I decide to do some work in my house. I was like, I’ve put in my time today! And I know there’s something going on later because I have a complet for it.

So I go to do dishes and clean up my house and try to get my cat to come down and eat (he does not so I throw pieces of gross meat/fat up to him so he doesn’t frigging starve to death). So just as I’m finishing this mom #2 Abi comes over and tells me I have to come out, NOW. So I’m like ok.

I go out and there are a bunch of ladies sitting around in Moussa’s part of the compound. I was kind of confused at first. They all got up and shook my hand. And they gave me half a rice sack of something (turned out to be peanuts). Turns out they were the ladies delegation sent over from the village chief’s house to saluer me and gove me peanuts. Cause the chief evidently does not make house calls, especially not to see a woman. Seli makes me go put on my complet. Everybody tells me how “a kanji” (pretty) it is and scolds me for not being able to wear the headwrap which is the same freaking size as the skirt. This annoys me. As do the kids trying to get me to pay attention to them by telling me I am ugly (a game that got obnoxious about 5 minutes after it was originally initiated). Yusuf makes some comment about how NOW I am a woman, because women wear skirts, not pants and wearing pants is “a manji” (bad/ugly) which gets on my nerves because I am of the belief that anyone should be able to wear whatever they want whenever they want if it makes them comfortable. In Guinea everyone thought my jeans were “jolie”. I miss that.

The ladies make an appointment for me to go over to the chief’s house and hang out with him tomorrow. Luckily Drissa is going with me for that.

So then I have to walk them out like halfway to the road because that’s polite and this is when Drissa drives up on his dad’s moto and tells me there is no marche tomorrow, which I had REALLY been looking forward to. So I’m all like DAMN! And on the way back to the compound I’m thinking I am going to go relax in my house a little bit and get over the no market thing. But no. There is a new group of ladies waiting to saluer me. This time it is my language tutor Khalifa’s mom and her groupement. And I desperately want to be polite and interesting but I am getting SO SICK of not understanding Bambara and my clothes being pulled left and right and assessed by everyone and their mother (literally) and the kids still calling me ugly and men poking and pulling on me and saying that I am now a woman and I should never wear pants. And I am biting back tears as hard as I can. I have a smile completely frozen on my face. A pained smile. Just trying to get through it.

Bless these ladies they don’t hang around too long either so I walk them out and have to go through saying all the goodbye greeting thingies Seli and Abi are feeding me to say and I am so annoyed with it at this point but I have to say it or I’ll be rude and everyone will be mad. So then I have to go back because two OTHER ladies have come to saluer me.

It was the afternoon of the saluer. Seriously.

So this is Drissa’s mom and another lady (I think). Seli, bless her heart, always says stuff really slow and clear to me to try and help me understand Bambara but sometimes she repeats it even after I understand it and I’m like yes, I get it. Also, if someone calls my name, I can’t just look at them to show them they have my attention. They will repeat my name until I give a verbal indication of my attention. I hate this. And I still want to cry. And there are moments where I almost do, or I get that feeling in my chest like I just want to RUN to my house and slam my door. So they don’t stay very long either and I have to walk them out and THEN there is another party going on with the groupement and Seli makes me go and I want to punch somebody and the only thing that saved me was I said I had to get my water so I had about 2 minutes alone inside my house to do some measured breathing to calm down enough to not cry in front of everybody.

So I go to this next thing. Everyone is all dressed up. Kids everywhere. Tea being made. I try to cheer myself up by making faces at kids.

I don’t generally feel like this unless I am PMSing. And according to my pill pack, I am not. I attribute it to stress.

So eventually I decide I want to go back to our compound for just a few minutes to kind of decompress or see what other people are doing or whatever. So I go back and I sit with the grandmas for five minutes, check out the soccer game a bunch of the younger men are watching on tv, then I go over to pet the dog, because the dog is my friend. As I walk up to her she is laying on the ground panting. I didn’t think this was too strange until I see she is covered in blood. And I’m like WHAT HAPPENED TO MY DOG.

Turns out she got in a fight with some other dog and I hope the other dog looks worse!! A lot of her wounds are minor but she has a couple of really nasty chunks taken out of her and she can’t use one of her legs and I am so sad and angry and I just walk back to my house and get a bucket of water, a bandanna and some soap and go back over to her and try to start cleaning her up. The men laugh at me. I ignore them. She decides she doesn’t want to be cleaned up right this second so she doesn’t let me get much done before she hobbles away on three legs.

So I stand up, get my bucket together, and go back to my house. Where I promptly shut the door and lock it. About 30 seconds later I hear Seli outside calling my name. I hide. She walks toward the court, probably to ask where I am.

When I am satisfied she is gone, I sit on my bed. That’s when the tears come. Not the loud sobbing I was expecting to experience or felt like experiencing today but just some slow pained tears. I get my volunteer handbook to see if it has the number for the whereabouts phone in it because I decide I am going to try and go to Bamako and see Raven tomorrow so she can talk me down. I find the number but just as I do Hawa comes to my window and tells me to come eat. I just grunt at her. She goes away. I pull myself together. Send Raven the text asking if I can spend the night there tomorrow night. Go back over to where the ladies are now sitting around big plastic bowls of spaghetti, the tuber thing and meat. I share a little stool with one of my grandmas. Somebody hands me a baggie of fresh ginger juice with a sprig of mint in it. Somebody hands me a bucket of water and I wash my hand, then we start eating. Seli sees me and comes over. She says that she had gotten together a bowl of food to send over to my house. She looks really understanding, like she saw the dog and knew I would be upset. I just said it was ok and I would eat here, which I did. And after enjoying my ginger juice, silently got up and went back home.

Where I took out all my braids, which had been itching my scalp for days. As I was coming back from a brief tourney of the compound as I was taking out my braids, I see the slow fat mouse. I get really pissed at him and grab the broom. And as he is right by the door I take a swat at him, never expecting to hit him, expecting him to wiggle out under the door. But I DO hit him. So I scream. Mostly from the horror of actually hitting him and seeing a wet spot on the ground and him squirming and twisting on the ground. So I didn’t really want to kill him but kneejerk reaction, I hit him again. Because a quick death is better than a slow one and I would hate to have fatally injured him but then have him die a slow painful death. On the second blow he gets up and skitters away. At my scream the boys outside had come running to the door. They see it is a mouse, and he is hiding between my stove’s gas tank and the wall. I don’t want to hit him again. One of the guys (it might have been Oumarri) comes in with a block of wood and we try to find the mouse, who has now hidden under the gas tank. When I tip the gas tank up he runs out and into my bedroom where Oumarri lunges after him and I hear the crack of the wood on the floor. But when I wheel around and look in, he has missed and the mouse has disappeared down that dang hole where they are getting in and out. Mouse survives. At least for now. Who knows, when I hit him I might have given him a brain hemhorrage or something. He at least “had his bell rung real good” as my dad would say. Maybe he will decide it’s not worth it to keep coming into my house. Maybe his brain is tiny and he’s going to forget all about it before the night is through.

Eventually I had the blessing of a bath with a hair washing. Then I had a laugh. Because when I got back from my bath, the cat was laying on the edge of the plastic so I put a pile of clothes under it and flipped his butt out of the ceiling! VICTORY! I laugh because he looks so shocked every time it happens. He hasn’t climbed back up yet. My bet is he will hang out down here until the sun starts coming up. Which is good, because he’ll scare any mice that come in, and I can rest assured he has had an opportunity to drink water and eat.

So all things considered, I feel better now that I’m going to bed. And I don’t know if I will end up heading to Bamako tomorrow or not. It would be after my hang out session with the chief. I guess we’ll see how I feel after that.