There is something really wrong with my toe. It’s the second one from the left on my left foot. I started to notice it hurting when I was fixing to leave Conakry a week ago and thought it was just that my nails were getting long so I cut my toenails. But then it just continued to get worse. It is now big, red, swollen, with white blisters and pain. Sometimes it’s hard to walk. It oozes a pus-y substance. It’s gross. People keep telling me to go to the hospital, where I can get a “medicament” (medicine) but honestly the hospital doesn’t have anything I don’t have in my medical kit and judging from the horror stories I have heard from other volunteers about Guinean medical care, I have decided to self-treat, which has not gone well, obviously. First I tried soaking my foot in bleach water and cleaning it with Beta-Sept (a surgical antiseptic scrub and the thing it appears Traian always tells you to try first about ANYTHING) and a brush, which hurts like hell but gets it clean. So I’ve been doing that, no improvement, keeps getting worse. So then I try putting triple antibiotic (Neosporin) on it at night, does nothing. My counterpart looks at it and says it’s the “champignon” or mushroom/fungus and that I got it from working in my yard in open-toed shoes (which EVERYONE here does, plus it started when I was in Conakry and hadn’t been working in any gardens for two weeks), so I start putting two different anti-fungal creams on it. Does nothing. Doesn’t seem to matter if I wear a band-aid or not. Definitely not getting better. If I weren’t invited to a wedding tomorrow, I would go to Telimele and call Traian but I don’t want to flake on the wedding especially when I don’t know whose wedding it is or the name of the person who invited me to say I can’t go. So if it’s not better Monday (it won’t be), I’m going to Telimele to call Traian and just hoping it’s not a flesh eating bacteria because I hear they send you back to the States for that. Shoot, I don’t even want to have to go to CONAKRY, let alone the States! Cross your fingers for me!
Monster toe aside, tonight I finally had my first “invitacion” to dinner with a family. I have eaten with the Sous Prefet’s family before, only twice “ensemble” and never with my hands, but it hasn’t been like a real “invitacion”. It was with the family of the dude who is my counterpart’s boss, but it wasn’t he who invited me, it was Mamadou Alpha Balde, who is an 11th grade student in Telimele but his family lives here and he was good friends with the last volunteer when she was here. He said he went running with her every day. Too bad I am way too “faible” for that! Anyway he is back in the village on “vacance” from school and had been by my house for a couple of days just talking and eating popcorn (Guineans LOVE it and can’t believe it when I tell them it is just corn and oil. And salt. Wait til I put cheese powder on it. I “invitacion-ed” 5 or 6 boys who were at my house yesterday and they all kept taking handfuls and exclaiming “c’est doux!”). Yesterday I had said that I don’t have a family here like the last volunteer did (she lived in a hut on a family’s compound, like many volunteers), I live alone in my own compound and the closest thing I have to a family is the Sous Prefet’s family. Anyway he said that he would take me to his house and introduce me to his family today. And I was like YAY! So when he came by to get me, Yogi and I went over and sat around and drank “attaya” (a green tea that can take hours to totally finish, men do it a lot here) and ate fresh peanuts that the family farms themselves. There was a goat tied up to a post that had a 2-day old goatlet (I guess in English we call it a “kid”? In Pular it is a “bao hun kun”). The goatlet was super cute but the mom was MEAN and wouldn’t give the goatlet all the milk it wanted. And when the family would flip the goat over and hold it down and try to get the goatlet to suckle, it wouldn’t really do it, only when the goat was standing up like it would normally feed, and that’s when it would kick the goatlet and walk away. Talk about a bad mom!! The second of the two goatlets had already died (might have been stillborn) and if this goat keeps up like this, this one will die too. Soon. (I went back the next day and Alpha told me the baby goat had died because the mom was mean)
Then he wanted to go to the video club to watch the soccer match between Burkina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire and I wanted to transplant my vegetable seedlings so he dropped me off at home and said he’d come get me for dinner.
So I transplanted my seedlings with the help of two of the neighborhood boys (I think they spy on me to see when I start working and then run over to help so I’ll give them lollipops. Smart kids.). So there is now a sunflower, zucchini, yellow zucchini, cucumber, bush beans, scarlet runner (a bean), corn (African, haven’t transplanted the sweet corn yet) and piment (African hot pepper) actually planted in the ground at my house. Lots of stuff never came up out of the “sachets” and the second round I only planted a few days ago so it hasn’t come up yet either.
Anyway then I washed all my dishes and sat on my porch “blague-ing” with Ousmane, this other student who has only recently started coming around and whose name I don’t know, and Ousmane II until Mamadou came to get me and I went to his house for dinner, which is only just down the road, across from the mosque, about a 2-3 minute walk.
So at first he was going to do what everyone does and give me a plastic chair and have me eat inside by myself but while he was getting the chairs I plopped down on an empty stool in the circle of the family, who had been waiting for me to arrive before they ate and said the word “ensemble”. And I think they were all a little surprised. Especially when I refused the spoon and said I wanted to eat with my hands like a Guinean, though I can NOT eat as fast as they do and was the last person finishing my triangle of the big plate. It was an awesome “mafe hakko bantara” (manioc leaf sauce) with fresh piments, just how I like it! And it was burning my fingers as I was eating it was so fresh and piping hot. And I love this family because they are like me and like to eat with A LOT of sauce. Like, more sauce than rice. Praise Allah.
It was the grandma who had made the sauce and I said “al barka” (God bless you) like 50 times and want to turn them into my family. There are a lot of them, including Aisiatou, who is one of two girls in the 10th grade here. I am trying to take her and the other 10th grade girl, Maimouna, to the girls’ conference in Mamou next month. Maimouna already said she could go, so now I have to figure out a way to raise the “community contribution” which is 15 mille per girl (or about $3). I think first thing I will do is ask the CRD (elected community office).
Also Madame Fofana who is a volunteer at the Centre de Sante made me “mafe tiga” (peanut sauce) for lunch today and sent it over with Nene and it was really good (she said she’d make it for me after I gave her my leftover produce before I left town last, which included potatoes, avocadoes and a coconut. I gave it to her because she said she only eats bread because she lives alone here and doesn’t have anything to cook with – her family lives in a big city to the south and her husband sends her money to live on which is why she is a volunteer but she hasn’t sort of “permanentized” her living situation i.e. setting up a “kitchen”). She also included her famous homemade piment sauce which is always a great touch to any plate of rice and sauce. And this morning Safi at the boutique had a pretty good peanut sauce, so when it comes down to it, I actually ate three meals of rice and sauce today. Now THAT’S truly Guinean.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment