Night Time

So at night is when a village really comes alive. Everybody’s done working for the day, everybody’s had their bath and their dinner and it’s time to just hang out.

I usually shut myself up in my house after my dinner, read or write for a little while and fall asleep early, when I can still hear little kids running around outside my house. So as I am doing this very thing, paging through The Kite Runner, I hear a bunch of clapping and singing. So eventually I was like ok, I gotta go see what these people are doing. I wish I had an invisibility cloak or something because whenever I go out there it causes a ruckus, especially at a time I am not usually around (like after dark), and I just wanted to watch. But as I have said before, never think you can just go somewhere and stand in the back as a silent observer. It pretty much never happens.

So some of the older women are pounding millet. Which is, like, an all-day, all-night activity around here. I took a few drives with the pestle but my hands are definitely not pestle-worthy, so the women always laugh and take the pestle away after a few strokes. The men are all gathered around the little TV hooked up to the car battery watching a soccer game. I don’t know who was playing, but soccer players are HOT…has anyone else ever noticed this before? Hmm. All the little boys were playing some sort of game and they all had sticks. I tried to teach them to high five but they weren’t getting it so I gave up quick. And then out by the well were all the young women and girls. Singing, clapping and dancing.

Right when I walked up I think they were just about to disperse but then somebody calls out “Oumou Diarra!” and everybody rushes back to the circle. They want me to dance but I’m not comfortable enough here yet to dance. I would have done it in Santou, but I had already lived there for 8 months. It’s one thing to make a fool out of yourself in front of people you consider your friends, an entirely different thing to do it in front of people who are still strangers. So I succeeded in being able to stand in the circle and just watch. One of Yusuf’s daughters was leading the singing, and then everybody clapped rhythmically based on the song she was singing. The two oldest girls were doing most of the dancing and kicking up such a dust cloud it could be seen even in the moonlight.

I stayed for a couple of songs, then wandered back to my house, where I swear I hear the high pitched chirp(?) of a mouse pretty much nightly. Magellan hears it too and is curious about it but has yet to get into a fistfight with said mouse. One of these days I’m gonna find one of those fat bastards laid out on my shoes in the morning, a proud Magellan standing watch over the carcass.

A girl can dream.