Weekend Update: Sunday

Here's a blog post that I wrote last summer but has been sitting around in my draft folder ever since:

On Saturday evening it started raining, and it rained all night long. By Sunday morning the thunder and lightning had subsided but it was still raining steadily and so laid around reading, took my time making breakfast, and then puttered around, watching TV and going through the newsletters and paperwork that Peace Corps sent out and wondering if it was just going to rain all day long.

It did stop raining by late morning, so I finally got dressed and sunscreened, picked up some tea and sugar, and headed over to visit Halimatou, a young woman who invited me over last week. I've seen her a few times, hanging out with the ladies who sit on the corner, selling roasted peanuts, fried plantain, fried fish, and shiny little packets of cookies. I stop by there pretty regularly to buy roasted peanuts, and occasionally some plantains, and a few of the women speak Pulaar. My Pulaar isn't that great, but Halimatou  was sufficiently impressed/entertained and so she pointed out her house and told me to come by on Sunday for lunch, so I did. I brought some tea and sugar with me, we hung out on the porch, chatting about this and that in Pulaar (and, when I was stumbling with my words, in French) and drinking sachets of extremely cold water and watching the little kids enthusiastically but inefficiently draw water from the family's well-maintained pump. Sarah, the other Response Volunteer in Kankan, came over too, and stayed for what turned out to be an extremely delicious lunch.

Me and Halimatou

They gave us a ridiculously large plate of steamed rice and a small vat of amazing peanut sauce - the kind that's rich and savory and full of vegetables and fried fish balls. The fish balls were the good kind, too, made from fresh fish pounded with peanut meal, onions, garlic and spices and, best of all, completely free of the wiry little bones that most people don't bother to pick out before pounding everything up. It was the best peanut sauce I've had since I arrived in Guinea, and I happily accepted an invitation to come back again next week.

Weekend Update: Saturday

After all the time spent on the road last week it was really nice to have a weekend in Kankan. Saturday I caught up on podcasts and cleaned up my rooms, and then went over to have lunch with Fatoumata, my work counterpart, and her family. It turns out that her compound is really nice - a large courtyard with mango trees, orange trees, banana trees, and palm trees, an overgrown garden and a big covered porch. Fatoumata's worked with Save the Children for years, and her husband is also quite successful, so they have two cars and a well-furnished living room decorated with porcelain knickknacks and family photos. Fatoumata's co-wife and all of the kids were really nice - the younger ones a little wary of me at first, but they warmed up to me after awhile. (It didn't hurt that I'd brought cookies.) Fatoumata and a few of the older girls were cooking an enormous tureen of sauce and several smaller pots of fonio (a delicious couscous-like grain) over small fires beside the main house while her co-wife was looking after a couple smaller kids. (Cooking fonio is a lot more expensive and time-consuming than cooking rice, but some of her husbands relatives are in town, so it was a bit of a special occasion.)

Photo of harvested fonio
courtesy of Ecotours-Senegal

Photo of fonio prepared with onion sauce
courtesy of Intrepid Herbivores

I hadn't realized that Fatoumata has a co-wife - she's well-educated, successful and to me seems very modern and Western, so I guess I just assumed that it was just her and her husband at home. I was thinking about it and can see that there are a lot of benefits to a polygamous arrangement for modern Guineans, especially given that they generally grow up with very rigid gender roles and polygamy as the norm. Since women run the household, having co-wife means that daily tasks are shared, that there's someone to watch your kids if you get sick or travel for work, and that you have the status boost of being married to a man who's wealthy and successful enough to have multiple wives. It's not very romantic from an American perspective, but if you think of marriage as a primarily practical institution it does make more sense, and it's also just how things are for a great number of people. I do think that polygamy is an inherently unequal and unfair system, but I don't think anyone here wants to hear my opinion of their marriage any more than I want to hear what they think about my not being married. (I've never had someone make unsolicited comments on my marital status in a way that made me like them more or think more highly of their opinions; without exception it has had the opposite effect.)

In any case, I was totally pleased to be invited over to a comfortable house filled with fruit trees, kids running around, good food, and pleasant people - they even remembered that Americans tend to be particular about water sources and gave me a large chilled bottled water before I had a chance to get out my own warm canteen out of my bag. I sat on the porch and gave kids high-fives for awhile as they ran giddily around in circles, I watched half an episode of the Ivory Coast version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire with Fatoumata's husband and we chatted about important English is for NGO work (his English is very good), and I ate most of a generous plate of steamed fonio covered with a very good meat-and-vegetable sauce. After lunch all done Fatoumata gave me a ride back to my place (on her way to drop off two big lidded pots of fonio and sauce with her in-laws and friends) and I spent the rest of the afternoon running errands in the market and reading and watching TV shows on my Netbook while impressive-looking storm clouds rolled in from the horizon. Not a bad day.